Although its position on top of the Monte Acuto where it overlooks the traditional route to Siena and Rome gives the Certosa del Galluzzo the appearance of a remote monastery, the charterhouse is located only a little over four kilometers from Florence’s southernmost city gate, known in the Cinquecento as the Porta di San Piero in Gattolino (Fig. 4.1). Indeed, it appears that the distance to town from the Certosa is not so great that it could not be managed on foot by a man in his late thirties, a painter by trade, even if he was burdened with a substantial payment that had been made to him in coin. That this painter, Bernardino Poccetti, came to be on the Via Senese with his earnings from the work he had done for the Carthusians in Galluzzo, is partly the result of the changed landscape of sixteenth-century Catholicism, and, in particular, the role taken on by the Carthusian order as the wider Church pursued its campaign of reform and renewal.

The foundation of the Certosa del Galluzzo dates to the Trecento, when Niccolò Acciaiuoli (1310–1365) made the initial bequest for the monastery. A Florentine merchant living in Naples in the 1330s, Acciaiuoli had assumed a powerful and high-ranking position within the Angevin court, and his decision to found a charterhouse outside Florence was most likely inspired by the Angevins’ patronage of the Certosa di San Martino, which had been founded by Charles, the Duke of Calabria, the oldest son of Robert the Wise.