The church of Santa Maria Maddalena de Pazzi is easily missed through its unassuming doorway on Borgo Pinti. The door gives way to a delightful courtyard, built to the designs of Giuliano da Sangallo from 1481 onwards. Developing the traditional Florentine monastic vernacular of arched porticoes, Giuliano adds a dash of the Greco-Roman, replacing the arches with a flat entablature. The columns are surmounted by a charming series of Ionic capitals with rather eccentric drooping scrolls. In spring the courtyard is filled with daisies.
This area of Florence is a welcome relief from the mayhem of the Piazza del Duomo, though not quite as rural as it would have been in the 15th Century. It was just one block north of here that Giuliano da Sangallo was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici to design a monumental villa (never built) and it was a neighbourhood popular with many sixteenth century artists: the area between the Borgo Pinti and SS Annunziata was home to Andrea del Sarto, Piero di Cosimo, Pontormo, Bronzino, Cellini (who cast his Perseus in a house near the Teatro della Pergola) and Perugino, whose painting we are on our way to see.
When you enter the church, make your way towards the high altar. At the end of the left wall is the entrance to the Sacristy, where you can leave a little offering and ask to see the ‘Crocifissione del Perugino’ in the Chapter House of the original order here, the Cistercians. On the walls of the corridor before you descend are some pictures honouring Maria Maddalena de Pazzi, the mystic Carmelite sister who was canonized by Urban VIII in 1626 and to whom the church was rededicated. You now pass through the crypt and up the other side into the Chapter House itself.
There are few places in Florence that can claim to possess such a peaceful and spiritual atmosphere as this simple room, unadorned except for Perugino’s Crucifix filling the end wall, and the small scene of Christ bending down from the cross to embrace St Bernard. The immediate impact is one of space – the wall opened out like a window into an idyllic landscape, the figures forming a pair of lines that meet at the crucified figure of Jesus whose cross hovers somewhere between our space and theirs. The mood is by no means tragic or even melancholic, rather one of repose and contemplation. Perugino himself was not, according to Vasari, a particularly religious man:
Pietro was a man of very little religion, and he could never be made to believe in the immortality of the soul – nay, with words in keeping with his head of granite, he rejected most obstinately every good suggestion. He placed all his hopes in the goods of fortune, and he would have sold his soul for money.
Nonetheless, no one was more attuned to the sensations of grace and purity in the natural world, especially landscape and female faces. It seems these were his own preoccupations after all, which were neither to be lost upon his most talented pupil, Raphael (Vasari continues):
He earned great riches; and he both bought and built houses in Florence, and acquired much settled property both at Perugia and at Castello della Pieve. He took a most beautiful young woman to wife, and had children by her; and he delighted so greatly in seeing her wearing beautiful head-dresses, both abroad and at home, that it is said he would often tire her head with his own hand. Finally, having reached the age of seventy-eight, Pietro finished the course of his life at Castello della Pieve where he was honourably buried, in the year 1524.
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