Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Pisa: Buffalmacho and Other Stuff

The cemetery on the Field of Miracles is a place few tourists get to. It contains all the usual things you'd expect for a Medieval/Renaissance cemetery, tombs and memorials and such. But it also houses some incredible frescoes from the 14th century, including Buffalmacho's more-than-enormous pieces dealing, seemingly, or presciently, with the catastrophe of 1348, that greatest catastrophe mankind has ever known, at least until our own time. Before going there, we visited the Sinopia, across the Field, where are displayed the mark-ups, as it were, for the great frescoes.
Before painting the fresco (quickly, on wet plaster), the master
would first do a full scale sketch, the sinopia, which his pupils
would then copy on to a full-scale cartoon, to guide the actual
painting; many such sketches survive at Pisa; this is one of
the Universe (seriously) according to Thomistic doctrine


















Now we are in the Cemetery, which contains scores of giant
Medieval and Renaissance frescoes















And here is the finished Universe















Interior of the Cemetery; soil from the Holy Land















The two gigantic Buffalmacho frescoes, the Judgement and
The Triumph of Death, were what interested us















The Triumph of Death is too large to capture on any normal
lens; here, on its left third, a knightly party encounters
corpses in the woods, representing the three estates; a third
or more of Europe died in the Black Death...

















In the right third, a group of young women have retreated
to the countryside to avoid the plague, a la Boccaccio, but
Death, partly obscured (scythe), stalks them
















In the right third of the Judgement, there is a fierce battle
for souls...















Spiritual tug-of-war















Cauldron of the damned















Snake pit of the damned (I'd really be concerned if they had
South Island sand flies)















Enough eschatological gloom; an artsy-fartsy view of the
duomo from the cemetery; redemptive, no?















0, 1, 1, 2,3,5,8,13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... tomb
of the 12th century mathematician Fibonacci,
aka Leonardo of Pisa; Vicki says she thinks
she remembers this from calculus; or maybe
from The Da Vinci Code; having flunked
algebra II and not having read The Da Vinci
Code, it is all beyond me, except I know that
no educated person refers to the great
Leonardo as "Da Vinci"

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