Museo delle Sinopie (Sinopie Museum, daily, summer, 10 am-8 pm, spring/autumn, 9 am-5:30 pm, winter, 9 am-5 pm).
Located in the 13th-century Spedale di Santa Maria Chiara on the southern side of the square, the collection includes the original sketches, basic layouts and studies behind the creation of The Triumph of Death, The Last Judgment, Stories of the Anchorites and Benozzo Gozzoli's Biblical Stories, among others. It also offers a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see the spedale itself - the old hospital built here in 1258 to designs by Giovanni di Simone, as a gesture of penitence and obedience to Pope Alessandro IV.

Art in Tuscany | Italian Renaissance painting

* Immagini del Giudizio Finale con confronto con le sinopie e disegni chiarificatori

* Immagini dell' Inferno con confronto con le sinopie e disegni chiarificatori

Ingrid D. Rowland, What the Frescoes Said | The New York Review of Books

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.

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article Buonamico Buffalmacco published under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:Buonamico Buffalmacco e Trionfo della Morte (Buffalmacco).

The location of Podere Santa Pia is unique and the landscape a once-in-a-life sight
.Although this is off the beaten track it is the ideal choice for those seeking a peaceful, uncontaminated environment.

Holiday accomodation in Tuscany | Podere Santa Pia | Artist and writer's residency

In the Last Judgement Christ and the Virgin are set side by side in separate mandorlas, and Christ concentrates upon a single condemnatory gesture. The traditional balance between the Blessed and the Damned has been maintained, but Hell has swollen to become almost a separate scene, running the full height of the wall and rivalling the whole of the rest of the Last Judgement in size. The change in relative proportion expresses the sense of guilt and the awareness of the just and terrifying wrath of God that follow the disasters of the forties and permeate the art of the fifties and sixties.

The sharpened realization of the evanescence of earthly life is nowhere more poignantly expressed than in the Triumph of Death . The setting of Boccaccio's Decameron, written in 1348-53, is inevitably recalled by the seated group of maidens and young men who make sweet music as death plunges down into the peaceful grove. The regular pattern of the tapestry of flowers recal1s the frescoes in the Papal Palace at Avignon and the influence of Simone and the Lorenzetti is clear in many of the figures. The flying putti, on the other hand, insist that this is still the Pisa of the Pisani with its heritage of Antique remains.

The centre of the scene is fil1ed with piled-up corpses flanked by cripples and aged beggars. A blinded leper with flesh fal1ing from his bones and both hands eaten from his outstretched arms beseeches death to come, and death will not, being intent upon the lovers in the glade. There is a maximum of contrast both with the idyllic scene upon the right and with the cavalcade of courtiers on the left as they encounter the three corpses rotting in their coffins.

The theme of judgement, fully elaborated in the succeeding fresco, is introduced by the angels and devils battling in the sky. The vanity of life is made explicit in the various inscriptions. Peace, and a long-lasting freedom even from the toils of earthly death, is illustrated by the aged Anchorites clustered round their hillside church. The theme is subsequently fully treated in the Legends of the Anchorites and counters any tendency to see the fresco as a simple outcry at the cruel arbitrariness of death. Nevertheless, such pagan protest is a significant undercurrent throughout the period. Open irreligion and, in large sections of the laity and clergy alike, an almost feverish moral laxity and self-indulgence were seemingly as common a reaction to the uncertainty of life as penitence and religious fervour.

The Trials of Job a few yards down the wall reiterate the orthodox view of the nature and meaning of the lavishly distributed pain and suffering that are part of life itself. The probable influence of the Dominicans of S. Caterina on the entire programme is disclosed by the relationship between the eremitical scenes and the vernacular Vite dei Santi Padri written by the Pisan Fra Domenico Cavalca (d.1342). The increase in artistic emphasis upon the Vita Contemplativa and the eremitical ideal throughout the second half of the century is one significant reaction to the moral and spiritual as well as to the economic and social stresses of the day.

The placing of the Legends of the Anchorites after the Last Judgement and next to the vast scene of Hell means that a series of abrupt contrasts, similar to those that underlie the opening composition of the Triumph of Death, embraces the entire sequence. The planar distribution of the Last Judgement differs from the more clearly spatial Giottesque pattern. It is matched by the piling up of the adjoining landscapes and by their tendency to a thoroughgoing compartmentalization. The spatial continuities established by the leading artists of the first half of the century are broken up into a series of individually three-dimensional compartments. The denial of the laws of diminution within the series and the absence of a consistent viewpoint create a surprisingly planar final effect. Such methods are as characteristic of many of the Northern and Central Italian artists working in the latter part of the century, as is the virtual abolition of pictorial space that occurs in the work of others.

Continuous controversy surrounds the problem of whether the frescoes should be attributed to the Pisan Francesco Traini, already mentioned in the documents as active in 1321 and possibly surviving until after 1363, or to an Emilian artist from the circle of Vitale da Bologna. The Emilian elements connected with Vitale's highly emotional style are as obvious as the detailed connexions with Traini's one signed work, the altarpiece of S. Domenico, dated 1345, now in the Museo Civico at Pisa. The argument therefore boils down to whether the work is by an Emilian, influenced by Traini and the Sienese, or by Traini, strongly influenced by the Emilians during a visit to Northern Italy that is reflected in certain frescoes in the baptistery at Parma. On the whole the latter hypothesis seems to be the more attractive and the frescoes are unlikely to have been painted much later than C. 1350.

The wartime damage which reduced the frescoes in the Camposanto to ruinous shadows of their former magnificence has, in partial compensation, disclosed one of the most extensive series of fourteenth-century under-drawings or sinopie so far known in Italy. They are a mine of information about the different hands cooperating on the various frescoes, about their compositional methods, and about the evolution of the final designs. The drawings beneath the Triumph of Death , in particular, combine boldness and freedom with a psychological depth and power of characterization that is often buried almost without trace beneath the precise stylizations, the firm contours, and the carefully built up modelling, which, together with the colour, add new decorative dimensions to the final work. In the Legends of the Anchorites the emotional intensity is, on the contrary, if anything increased in the final work. The picture of the evolution of the fresco is, however, enriched by the way in which a more disciplined and less evocative system of brush contours is built up into full chiaroscuro modelling in many of the figures.

As artist succeeds artist on the decorative scheme; Francesco da Volterra and his associates (1371-2); Andrea Bonaiuti da Firenze (1377) ; Antonio Veneziano, with his intricate and precise architectural underdrawings (1384-6); Spinello Aretino (1391-2); Piero di Puccio, coming from the mosaics of the facade at Orvieto (1381-7) and working from 1389 to 1391; the series becomes a textbook of late-fourteenth-century working processes. Nevertheless, except in the work of Antonio Veneziano, the generally modest level of performance is transcended only in the sudden vision of a desolate seascape in the opening scene of the Trials of Job . I Whether or not the common attribution of the seascape to Taddeo Gaddi can be justified, its visual poetry rivals or surpasses that in any work by Maso or the major followers of Giotto.

[John White: Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400, Pelican History of Art 1993]