One of the capitals of Italian art and a destination that could not be missed from as early as the eighteenth century for travellers, artists and men of letters, the Cemetery of Pisa has seen its success fade during the XX century, ousted by the rising popularity of the Leaning Tower and damaged by adverse events that the recent restoration works are at last trying to correct.
The Cemetery is the last monument on Piazza del Duomo, its long marble wall flanking the northern boundary and completing its shape. It was founded in 1277 to accommodate the Roman sarcophagi that until then were scattered all around the Cathedral and were reused to bury local noblemen. Archbishop Federico Visconti wanted the building to be a “large and dignified, secluded and enclosed place". This is how one of the oldest Christian Medieval architectures for the devotion of the dead came into being.
At first the sarcophagi were placed in the uncovered central area which according to tradition contains, as a huge reliquary, the “holy land” brought from Palestine at the time of the second Crusade (1146). Humbler graves were instead placed underneath the floor in the side corridors.
During the fourteenth century, as the construction took shape, the inner walls were embellished by wonderful frescoes about Life and Death, created by the two great artists of the time, Francesco Traini and Bonamico Buffalmacco, who seem to stage the sermons declaimed in town by the Dominican Cavalca or the frightening views of Dante’s Comedy; reference to it is most evident in the Triumph of Death and in the Last Judgement painted by Buffalmacco, who is also known as the character of some of Boccaccio’s stories. The cycle of frescoes goes on well into the fourteenth century with the Stories of Pisan Saints by Andrea Bonaiuti, Antonio Veneziano and Spinello Aretino and the Stories of the Ancient Testament, started by Taddeo Gaddi and Piero di Puccio and finished in the mid-15th century by the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli, along the northern wall.
Since the sixteenth century, the Cemetery has sheltered the sepulchres of the most prestigious lecturers of the local University and the members of the Medici family, who ruled over the city at that time and are also hinted at by the characters of the Biblical scenes frescoed on the shorter walls. The monument was to become the Pantheon of local memories: not only of the local people or families but also of the glorious classical and Medieval past of the city. The building began to be used as a museum, its walls engraved with Roman epigraphs and the sarcophagi relocated to the corridors, acting now as valuables documents of history and art.
The use of the building as a museum established itself in the early nineteenth century when the Cemetery became one of Europe’s first public museums. In the years in which Napoleon decreed that many works of art should be taken away from the churches and taken to France, Carlo Lasinio, appointed Curator of the Cemetery by Maria Luisa, Queen of Etruria, collected amidst its frescoed walls the sculptures and paintings that were in the suppressed churches and convents of the city. Other works came from the Cathedral and the Baptistery, along with remains from the local archaeological sites and the antiques markets. In the meantime, commemorative and funerary monuments dedicated to the city notables continued to be built in the corridors that were renamed galleries.
Thus the Cemetery acted as a venue for patriotic celebrations and meditations on death, meaning not simply a private bereavement but also a social and political loss, that sees glory and civilisations disappear. Such melancholy charm and its unique combination of different ages and styles, ranging from the antiquity to the modern age, made this monument a favourite of Romantic artists, visited, admired and studied by artists and men of letters from all over Europe.
The frescoes that became most widely known in the nineteenth century through a proliferation of sketches, drawings and engravings were however already in a state of obvious decay. While whole parts of the scenes collapsed to the ground, tests and experimental restorations were conducted all through the century and well into the following one, in the attempt to stop the colours crumbling away and the plaster coming off. However the deterioration of the Cemetery was not only due to the problems of the frescoes: the sculptures and paintings that Lasinio had displayed there were relocated to more modern museums; the sublime nineteenth-century statuary art was removed, in the attempt to give back to the building its assumed Medieval appearance.
However the most dramatic moment occurred during the Second World War: on July 27th 1944, a grenade set off a terrible fire which abruptly stopped all the controversies and plans for the restoration of these frescoes.
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