Museo della Certosa di Pavia

The Charterhouse of Pavia is so dominated by its church that its museum is easy to underestimate. Housed in the Palazzo Ducale, the Visconti-Sforza summer residence facing the entrance courtyard, the state museum gathers the monastery's detached art — plaster casts of the facade, paintings, Renaissance sculpture and a frescoed studiolo — in two floors of quiet monumentality.

Why it matters

Opened to the public for the first time in 1911 and reopened on a permanent basis in 2008, the museum is the state-run key to understanding the Certosa's art. Its ground-floor gipsoteca displays some two hundred plaster casts of the reliefs from the church facade, the cloisters and other parts of the monastery — a rare chance to study Renaissance carving at eye level that the weathered originals deny — including the cast of Cristoforo Solari's funerary monument of Ludovico il Moro and Beatrice d'Este. On the first floor, the picture gallery presents works associated with the monastery's great campaigns, including paintings by Bernardino Luini, Ambrogio Bergognone and Bartolomeo Montagna, alongside Renaissance sculpture and a marble Flagellation by Antonio Mantegazza. the Palazzo Ducale was the summer residence of the Visconti-Sforza lords, its facade redesigned by Francesco Maria Richini in 1625.

What to notice

The plaster casts preserve details of the facade that centuries of weather have softened in the stone; the cast of Solari's monument reproduces the lost ducal tomb of Ludovico il Moro and Beatrice d'Este. The first-floor display includes the frescoed Studiolo of the second half of the sixteenth century, decorated with grotesques, landscapes and a Dream of Constantine; it is the museum's most intimate room and easily missed. The display also includes medieval frescoes by Bernardino de Rossi and portraits of the Visconti-Sforza dynasty. The complex also preserves monumental rooms associated with the residence, including spaces connected with monastic dormitory and refectory life.

Context and history

The museum was created as the state's answer to a problem intrinsic to the Certosa: sculpture and painting detached from their original settings needed a documented home. The idea matured in the late nineteenth century, during the restorations led by Luca Beltrami, and the 1911 opening followed Beltrami's layout; after decades of intermittent arrangement the museum was relaunched permanently in 2008 under the Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Lombardia of the Ministry of Culture. Its collections trace the monastery's artistic life from its fourteenth-century origins onward, making the museum the interpretive complement to the church — church and museum each governed by a different arm of the state — and the institutional memory of the complex.