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"