Buffalmacco at Pisa

This article begins with a confession, a confession of a lacuna so wide and so peculiar that, like most confessions I suppose, it is embarrassing even to think about, let alone to make: it is my virtually complete ignorance of the personality and work of Buonamico Buffalmacco (born Buonamico di Martino: 1262? - post 1341)! Not that one knows everything - far from it - but sometimes, the gaps are surprising; I 'discovered' Buffalmacco in reading an essay by the Italian art historian Donata Levi in a compendium of articles dedicated to the 19th century Italian art historian, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) 1. The article deals with the precocious use of photographs by the two art historians and connoisseurs, Cavalcaselle and his English friend and co-author, Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) 2.

The better part of Levi's piece deals with the archive of photos and drawings (kept in Venice and London) made and used by Cavalcaselle in his research into and documentation of the frescos in the Camposanto at Pisa. The Camposanto is the name given to a specific part of that monumental complex which includes the cathedral, its baptistry, the famous Leaning Tower and a cemetery. This last is a four-sided Gothic structure (foundation 1277) built around an area known as the Campo Santo (Holy Field); its cloister was frescoed by a number of artists from the 14th century through to the mid-15th (the work of Benozzo Gozzoli), this latest part now unfortunately almost completely lost.

Recently, a major restoration campaign was undertaken on the remaining large frescos, much damaged over the centuries - including by a bomb during the second World War - and apparently restored on various earlier occasions, including once under the supervision of Cavalcaselle himself 3. The sections of the mural decoration attributed to Buffalmacco are entitled the Last Judgement, Hell, the Triumph of Death and the Thebaid (an image of an 'alternative' life-style, one lived by hermit monks and church fathers [desert fathers] in the quasi-legendary Theban desert of Egypt).

The Thebaid, 1336 -1341 by Buonamico Buffalmacco, 6 x 15.6 m, fresco

Camposanto, Pisa

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Buffalmacco, mentioned by both Vasari and Ghiberti 4, has now been almost unanimously accepted as the author of the above-named scenes after their having been given by various historians to other artists, especially to Francesco Traini. In a certain sense, the true author or painter of a given work, in my opinion, is not as important however, as the work itself - particularly when we are standing right in front of the work in question. In fact, there are many 'anonymous' works which we are quite happy to admire and even to declare as masterpieces 5, even though so far, we do not know who the author was. But we do have his or her work and that work of art is part of our culture, is an exemplar of the thought and point of view of a particular era ('point-of-view' understood as well in its literal sense of the way a person actually sees the world, and chooses to represent it), given which the name of the artist - important as that may be from an art-historical position - is, so to speak, part of the 'marginalia' of the work in question.

What I discovered in following-up on Donata Levi's essay was a supremely powerful and skilful artist. After growing up and working in Florence, he eventually received the commission to decorate the walls of a section of the Camposanto with a series of very large frescos illustrating, for the benefit of the Pisans, the Last Judgement (il Giudizio Universale), with Hell (l'Inferno) beside it, the Triumph of Death (Trionfo della Morte) - a stern warning to people to be aware of the inevitability of death - and the Thebaid (Tebaide) - an alternative to the perhaps morally dangerous urban way of life. In the various restorations to which these frescos have been subjected, the 'sinopie' - the original drawings made in a water colour-like paint called 'sinopia' on the first layer of plaster - have been found and in their turn restored and preserved. And it was images of these 'sinopie' which first alerted me to the power of Buffalmacco: wonderful, synthetical and confident drawings. To me they seem to have something more individual, something more specific in their characterisations of people and especially of faces; more so than perhaps Giotto, of whom Buffalmacco was initially a follower, but who later - and this has been posited as a reason for his departure from Florence - in a certain way, rejected various tenets of Giotto's work and finished, if Pisa is any indication, with a more fluid - perhaps older - representation of space while including, as suggested, a more individualised representation of various actors in his stories.

Perhaps the most famous of these is his Triumph of Death and especially its lower left corner, in which a party of nobles while out hunting on horse-back, is suddenly confronted with a scene of Death in the form of three coffins containing bodies in different stages of the cycle of decay: one newly dead, another putrefying and the last, already a skeleton. The shock and wonder of these beautifully-dressed figures is so well represented but, at the same time, is contrasted with that scene in front of them, and the one above of the quiet, contemplative rural life of the monks who have warned them to always be prepared for death. The lesson is an appropriate one for a place such as a cemetery which the Camposanto was. Buffalmacco's scene of the Last Judgement and the possible result of that judgement, Hell, joined to it horizontally - unlike many such representations, including that by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, normally arranged vertically - are equally extraordinary paintings, his torments in Hell seemingly based on those in Dante's Divine Comedy. All three scenes as well as the Thebaid are full of marvellous observation but, as has happened before, the 'sinopie' offer another level on which to appreciate the skill and intense 'looking' of this master.

A detail of the 'sinopie' found underneath the Thebaid of Buffalmacco

Camposanto, Pisa

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In the image above, the central figure of the young man leaning to his right is a wonderful example of highly skilled drawing; so too that of his companion's donkey, with the indication of a descending space formed by the downward curve of the backward-leaning friar and the difference in height between the donkey's rump and the position of the younger man. On the extreme right of this photo is the excellent head of an older man; the foreground figure of a crouching monk, caught in the action of fishing, is a succinct and clear description reminiscent, for me, of similar qualities in Giotto; but the younger man first-mentioned is typical of what I see as Buffalmacco's independent intensity.

As suggested in some of my other articles, one of the great benefits of being able to see, to experience, these frescos 'in situ' is precisely that, that they are in their original situation, in the place for which - and in which - they were made. That is to say, they are not, so to speak, disembodied, disorientated, at least partially silenced, in some museum or art gallery, perhaps somewhere on the other side of the world, not even in Europe. André Malraux has much to say concerning this idea in the opening pages of his The Voices of Silence 6, to which I will refer in future essays. Like the much later frescos in some of the rooms of the Pitti Palace in Florence, these works are conditioned in the first place, by their presupposed audience, but also by the situation, size and structure of the Gothic cloister itself, by the very physical structure of the place. All of these elements, not to mention the a priori beliefs of the audience, are in effect completely absent - we could say, completely denied - in the museum space and particularly so if the museum or art gallery is a modern one. As good  - and as necessary - as museums may be, there is unquestionably no comparison between seeing a work there and experiencing it in its intended original environment; I use the word 'experiencing' deliberately as, for me, the appreciation of an art work is not alone the actual 'seeing', it is also the cognition and experience of its 'home', as it were, its 'state of origin'. 

1 Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle 1819 - 2019; Una visione europea della storia dell'arte, a cura di Valerio Terraroli, ZeL Edizioni, 2019. Donata Levi's article is called Come un moderno Photoshop: fotografie manipolate tra le carte di Cavalcaselle e Crowe [Like a modern Photoshop: manipulated photographs among the papers of Cavalcaselle and Crowe] pp 41 - 57.

2 A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth century, 1864, by J.A. Crowe and J.B. Cavalcaselle.

3 Levi, op cit: p 49: the Death and funeral of Saint Ranieri (from the series of frescos, also in the Camposanto, dealing with the life of that saint, painted between 1377 and 1385 by Andrea di Bonaiuto and Antonio di Francesco, known as il Veneziano) was restored between 1885 and 1886 by Domenico Fiscali "sotto la sorveglianza di Cavalcaselle." ["under the supervision of Cavalcaselle"].

4 Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, by Giorgio Vasari, Giuntina edition, 1568;

   I commentarii by Lorenzo Ghiberti, manuscript datable to the mid-15th century.

5 If I may be allowed a brief excursus I would like to add a few remarks concerning the term 'masterpiece': it seems that initially this term referred to a kind of graduation exercise, one required by the apprentice artist at the conclusion of his (or her) apprenticeship and which, if successful, enabled the artist to set up shop as an independent 'master' as recognised by the appropriate guild. Some time later, at least in Italy, a similar notion implied that a commissioned work was completed entirely - or almost so - by the 'master' of the shop and not by the assistants or apprentices (masterpiece in Italian is 'capolavoro', that is, a work by the boss [capo]!); many contracts from the period specified that circumstance as a principal condition. Later still, especially in modern times, it has come to signify a supreme example of the work of a given artist or school or style. In contemporary popular use, it is now through abuse, like so many epithets (for instance, 'icon', 'legend' and 'hero'), almost meaningless!

6 The Voices of Silence by André Malraux, published by Paladin in 1974 (original copyright 1953); an excellent book written, obviously, prior to contemporary restorations and scholarship but, because of its philosophical bent, is still an immensely important work. His observations concerning the effect of photography on both the diffusion and comprehension of artworks are as significant as they ever were.