Window of Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, Florence, Italy. |
The monks at San Giusto were famous for the stained glass windows they made; hence one of numerous theories that the name 'Pinti' may be a contraction of 'dipinti 'or 'dipintori' (paintings or painters). Using their own glass furnaces, the Ingesuati monks provided windows for the Neri family's church Cestello and for Santa Maria del Fiore among other churches. They also ran an art school and were famous for making the color pigments used by painters, producing a coveted ultramarine blue. Their customers included the likes of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Del Sarto, Ghirlandaio and Filippo Lippi. In the introduction to L'Arte Vetraria, Antonio Neri waxes poetic:
Glass is also a great ornament to God's churches since, among other things, many beautiful windows are made adorned with graceful paintings, in which the metallic colors are so intense and vivid that they seem like so many oriental gems.The windows that inspired these lines may well have been made by monks of San Giusto. As a child, Antonio Neri had seen the striking windows in Cestello and in the city cathedral. It would be nice to be able to connect him to the Ingesuati, but in 1529, long before his birth, their entire complex just outside the Pinti Gate was dismantled in defensive preparation for the siege of Florence. The Florentine military cleared away the structures near the outside of the city walls. The monks of San Giusto alle Mura moved to the much smaller Calza Convent on the oltrarno, on the opposite side of town near the Porta Romana gate. They did not rebuild the glassworks at the new location and it is doubtful that any of the glass workers would have still been alive by the time Antonio Neri came of age.