Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Triumph of Death, (detail, right part)

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Last Judgement and Hell (detail), 1336-1341, fresco, Campo Santo, Pisa

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Triumph of Death, (detail), c. 1338-39

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, Il Giudizio finale e L’Inferno, affrescato (dettaglio), 1336-1341 (parte destra)

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Buonamico Buffalmacco, Il Giudizio finale e L’Inferno, affrescato (dettaglio), 1336-1341

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, Il Giudizio finale e L’Inferno, affrescato (dettaglio), 1336-1341 (parte destra)

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Sinopia of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Triumph of Death, (detail, left part), c. 1338-39, fresco, Campo Santo, Pisa

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Triumph of Death, (detail), c. 1338-39, fresco, Campo Santo, Pisa

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Triumph of Death, (detail, right part), c. 1338-39, fresco, Campo Santo, Pisa

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Giacobbe Giusti: BUONAMICO BUFFALMACCO: Restored 14th-century frescoes in the Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy

 

Wikipedia: The Campo Santo, also known as Camposanto Monumentale (« monumental cemetery ») or Camposanto Vecchio (« old cemetery »), is a historical edifice at the northern edge of the Cathedral Square. « Campo Santo » can be literally translated as « holy field », because it is said to have been built around a shipload of sacred soil from Golgotha, brought back to Pisa from the Fourth Crusade by Ubaldo de’ Lanfranchi, archbishop of Pisa in the 12th century. The building was the fourth and last one to be raised in the Cathedral Square. It dates from a century after the bringing of the soil from Golgotha, and was erected over the earlier burial ground. The construction of this huge, oblong Gothic cloister was begun in 1278 by the architect Giovanni di Simone. He died in 1284 when Pisa suffered a defeat in the naval battle of Meloria against the Genoans. The cemetery was only completed in 1464.

The walls were once covered in frescoes; the first were applied in 1360, the last about three centuries later. The first was the Crucifixion by Francesco Traini, in the south western side. Then, continuing to right, in the southern side, the Last Judgement, The Hell, The Triumph of Death and the Anacoreti nella Tebaide, usually attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco. The cycle of frescoes continues with the Stories of the Old Testament by Benozzo Gozzoli (15th century) that were situated in the north gallery, while in the south arcade were the Stories of Pisan Saints, by Andrea Bonaiuti, Antonio Veneziano and Spinello Aretino (between 1377 and 1391), and the Stories of Job, by Taddeo Gaddi (end of 14th century). In the same time, in the north gallery were the Stories of the Genesis by Piero di Puccio. On 27 July 1944, a bomb fragment from an Allied raid started a fire. Due to all the water tanks being controlled, the fire could not be put out in time, and it burnt the wooden rafters and melted the lead of the roof. The destruction of the roof severely damaged everything inside the cemetery, destroying most of the sculptures and sarcophagi and compromising all the frescoes. After World War II, restoration work began. The roof was restored as closely as possible to its pre-war appearance and the frescoes were separated from the walls to be restored and displayed elsewhere. Once the frescoes had been removed, the preliminary drawings, called sinopie were also removed. These under-drawings were separated using the same technique used on the frescoes and now they are in the Museum of the Sinopie, on the opposite side of the Square. The restored frescoes that still exist are gradually being transferred to their original locations in the cemetery, inside the cemetery, to restore the Campo Santo’s pre-war appearance.

 

The Triumph of Death | Page about historian Barbara Tuchman’s analysis of the Traini (or Buffalmacco) fresco. American historian Barbara Tuchman examined the Traini fresco and described it thus: « A scroll warns that ‘no shield of wisdom or riches, nobility or prowess’ can protect them from the blows of the Approaching One. « They have taken more pleasure in the world than in things of God. » In a heap of corpses nearby lie crowned rulers, a Pope in tiara, a knight, tumbled together with the bodies of the poor, while angels and devils in the sky contend for the miniature naked figures that represent their souls. »[Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978] Robert Baldwin | Buffalmacco, Triumph of Death, Camposanto (Cemetery Building), Pisa, 1330s This essay intersperses sections from Baldwins essay on Penitential Piety found in the larger essay, “Late Medieval 1. Sacred” with sections on two Trecento works: Buffalmacco’s frescoes in Pisa and Giovanni da Modena’s Last Judgment in Bologna.

Buonamico di [son of] Martino or Buonamico Buffalmacco (active c. 1315–1336) was an Italian painter who worked in Florence, Bologna and Pisa. Although none of his known work has survived, he is widely assumed to be the painter of a most influential fresco cycle in the Camposanto in Pisa, featuring the The Three Dead and the Three Living, the Triumph of Death, the Last Judgement, the Hell, and the Thebais (several episodes from the lives of the Holy Fathers in the Desert). Painted some ten years before the Black Death spread over Europe in 1348, the cycle – a « painted sermon » (L. Bolzoni) – enjoyed an extraordinary success after that date, and was often imitated throughout Italy. The youngsters’ party enjoying themselves in a beautiful garden while Death piles mounds of corpses all around is likely to have inspired the setting of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written a few years after the Black Death. Boccaccio (in his Decameron) and Franco Sacchetti (in his Il trecentonovelle) both describe Buonamico as being a practical joker. Boccaccio features Buonamico along with his friends and fellow painters Calandrino and Bruno in several tales (Day VIII, tales 3, 6, and 9; Day IX, tales 3 and 5). Typically in these stories, Buonamico uses his wits to play tricks on his friends and associates: convincing Calandrino that a stone he possesses (heliotrope) confers invisibility (VIII/3), stealing a pig from Calandrino (VIII, 6), convincing the physician Master Simone of an opportunity to ally himself with the devil (VIII, 9), convincing Calandrino that he has become pregnant (IX, 3), convincing Calandrino that a particular scroll can cause a woman to fall in love with him (IX, 5). Throughout the stories, Buonamico is frequently depicted at work painting in the houses of notable gentlemen in Florence but eager to take time to eat, drink and be merry. Art in Tuscany | Giorgio Vasari | Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects | Buonamico Buffalmacco Giorgio Vasari includes a biography of Buonamico in his Lives, in which he tells several anecdotes about his comic escapades. Vasari tells of Buonamico’s youthful tricking of his master Tafi during his apprenticeship, various pranks and tricks that Buonamico played on his patrons, and his habit of embedding texts within his paintings. Dismissed by Vasari as just another of the witty painter’s gags, which his « clumsy » contemporaries had misunderstood and foolishly imitated, the Camposanto frescoes are actually scattered with texts, a possible indication of the veracity of Vasari’s remark. In the scroll over the cripple beggars in the center of The Triumph of Death, for instance, it says, « Since prosperity has completely deserted us, O Death, you who are the medicine for all pain, come to give us our last supper. » Vasari discusses various paintings by the artist which no longer exist, and many of which had already perished by the time of Vasari’s writing in the sixteenth century. He describes a series of paintings at the convent of Faenza in Florence (already destroyed by the sixteenth century), works for the abbey of Settimo (now also lost), tempera paintings for the monks of the abbey of Certosa (also in Florence), and frescoes in the Badia at Florence. He describes a series of paintings depicting the life of Saint Catherine of Siena in a chapel in her honor in Assisi at the Basilica of Saint Francis (an attribution rejected by later scholars), and several prominent commissions at various abbeys and convents in Pisa. Interestingly, Vasari does not attribute the famed Pisan frescoes now associated with Buonamico to the painter, but rather, credits him with four frescoes at the Camposanto depicting the beginning of the world through the building of Noah’s Ark, which later scholars have instead attributed to Piero di Puccio of Orvieto. Vasari presents conflicting information regarding Buonamico’s death, dating it to the year 1340, but also stating that he was still alive in 1351. In any case, he is said to have died at the age of 78, in poverty, and to have been buried at the hospital of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence.

 

The magnificent frescoes of the Camposanto, or monumental cemetery, of Pisa. Begun in 1278 as part of the glorious complex that also includes the Cathedral and the Leaning Tower, the Camposanto’s gleaming white marble has proclaimed Pisa’s wealth and taste for more than seven centuries, and for several of those centuries, the city’s independence. The commission for the frescoes of the Camposanto (circa 1330–1340) went to a painter named Buonamico Buffalmacco. The marvelous series of frescoes which, beginning with The Triumph of Death, attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco, and continuing with the works of Spinello Aretino, Antonio Veneziano, Andrea da Firenze, Taddeo Gaddi, Piero di Puccio and Benozzo Gozzoli, were disastrously ruined in the bombing of August 1944. The project for the building and its decoration was initiated by the magistrates of Pisa with significant input from local Dominican preachers. The city’s Dominicans played a key role in selecting the imagery and, presumably, formulating the many inscriptions.Among the decorations was a large fresco cycle including a Last Judgment, Hell, a Triumph of Death, and a long fresco depicting the early Christian “Desert Fathers,” that is, the earliest practitioners of monastic living in the remote deserts of Egypt, the Holy Lands, and North Africa. Various early sources attest to Buffalmacco’s celebrity as an artist – evidently one of the leading painters of the post-Giotto generation – and a burlesque character. Their cumulative testimony is impressive, but as no works can be securely attributed to him, many critics have regarded him as a legendary rather than a historical figure. Recently, however, there have been attempts to give Buffalmacco a stature commensurate with his literary reputation by attributing to him the famous frescoes of The Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo, Pisa, which until the essay by Luciano Bellosi in 1974 was considered the work of Francesco Traini.
	Camposanto monumentale di Pisa Pisa, Camposanto Monumentale The Camposanto, or cemetery, was begun in 1278 by Giovanni di Simone, and completed in the 15C. The interior is in the form of an oblong cloister, lit by graceful traceried windows (never filled with glass). Tradition has it that this is the site of an earlier burial ground for which Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi (1108-78) brought five shiploads of earth from the Holy Land. It was used as a cemetery for illustrious Pisan citizens up to 1779. It was decorated with frescoes in the 14C and 15C. From the 14C onwards Roman sculptures were brought here, including a huge collection of sarcophagi.  The walls were once covered in frescoes. the first were applied in 1360, the last about three centuries later. The first was the Crucifixion by Francesco Traini, in the south western side. Then, continuing to right, in the southern side, the Last Judgement, The Hell, The Triumph of Death and the Anacoreti nella Tebaide, usually attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco. The cycle of frescoes continues with the Stories of the Old Testament by Benozzo Gozzoli (15th century) that were situated in the north gallery, while in the south arcade were the Stories of Pisan Saints, by Andrea Bonaiuti, Antonio Veneziano and Spinello Aretino (between 1377 and 1391), and the Stories of Job, by Taddeo Gaddi (end of 14th century). In the same time, in the north gallery were the Stories of the Genesis by Piero di Puccio. On 27 July 1944, a bomb fragment from an Allied raid started a fire. Due to all the water tanks being controlled, the fire could not be put out in time, and it burnt the wooden rafters and melted the lead of the roof. The destruction of the roof severely damaged everything inside the cemetery, destroying most of the sculptures and sarcophagi and compromising all the frescoes. After World War II, restoration work began. The roof was restored as closely as possible to its pre-war appearance and the frescoes were separated from the walls to be restored and displayed elsewhere. Once the frescoes had been removed, the preliminary drawings, called sinopie were also removed. These under-drawings were separated using the same technique used on the frescoes and now they are in the Museum of the Sinopie, on the opposite side of the Square.[1] Camposanto Monumentale, after July 1944 Buonamico Buffalmacco, The Three Dead and the Three Living (on the left) and The Triumph of Death, fresco, Campo Santo, Pisa, c. 1338-39 The Triumph of Death The celebrated frescoes, the Triumph of Death, with accompanying scenes of the Last Judgment, Hell, and Legends of the Hermits were attributed for long time to Francesco Traini. These, among the outstanding Italian paintings of the 14th century, were badly damaged by bombs in the Second World War, but this brought to light, by way of partial compensation, the beautiful ‘sinopie, which are now shown in the Museo delle Sinopie. The frescoes include many telling details of death’s victims and are usually seen as a reflection of the horrors of the Black Death of 1348, but some authorities consider them earlier and attribute them to the mysterious Buffalmacco. The triumph of Death emerged as a major theme in late medieval culture for many reasons. Major factors include the impact of recurrent plagues (widely interpreted as divine punishment for sin), the growth of penitential piety, the growth of the city with the emergence of a wealthy burgher class, and the rise of new, urban preaching orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) in the thirteenth century which brought monastic values directly to urban society. The fresco, with its naturalistic details, shows direct influences of the Sienese masters, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

[1] A sinopia is the name given to the sketch for a fresco made on the rough wall (prepared with arriccio) in a red earth pigment (called sinopia because it originally came from Sinope on the Black Sea). The sinopia was then gradually covered with grassello, another type of wet plaster, as work proceeded day by day on the fresco itself. By detaching a fresco from the wall it has been possible in many instances to recover the sinopia from the inner surface. Restoration of the frescoes proved to be difficult, and it was the work of « strappo », the act of detaching a fresco from a wall in order to transfer it to a canvas or other support, which revealed the original design of the works of Buonamico Buffalmacco, Spinello Aretino, Antonio Veneziano, Andrea da Firenze, Taddeo Gaddi, Piero di Puccio and Benozzo Gozzoli,. Restored to their original beauty, the sinopie are the main attraction of the Museo delle Sinopie. Bibliografia* Peleo Bacci, Gli affreschi di Buffalmacco scoperti nella chiesa di Badia in Firenze, « Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della P. Istruzione », V (1911); * Peleo Bacci, Bonamico Buffalmacco pittore e la critica tedesca: un documento pisano del 1336, « Marzocco », XXII, 1917; * Pier Paolo Donati, Proposta per Buffalmacco, « Commentarii », 1967, pp.290-296; * Luciano Bellosi, Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della Morte, Torino, Einaudi, 1974 (nuova ed. Five Continents, Milano 2003); * Il Camposanto di Pisa, a cura di C. Baracchini e E. Castelnuovo, Torino 1996. The Decoration of the Camposanto in Pisa by John White: Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400 Pelican History of Art 1993

 

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