The main building of the Cemetery did not materialise straight away as we see it now, it was erected in several stages and painted in its vast outer walls as they were being put up.
Placed at the junction of the first built-up section, the south-eastern corner, the Crucifixion, a gigantic altar dossal probably commissioned around 1332-33, connected the scenes after Christ’s death, that flanked it along the same wall, to the vast cycle known as the Triumph of Death that stretched out over the southern wall.
Canonically portrayed on the Cross between the two thieves, standing out over the procession of soldiers snaking out to the right and over the group of mourning women that gather around the Mother on the left, Christ offers the example of His sacrifice to the devotees’ vision. And at the same time in the scenes next to them, He strengthens in them, by displaying His stigmata, the patient endurance proposed by the allegories of the Triumph and reassures them through the example of His Resurrection and Ascension about the final outcome of the fight against the temptations of earthly life. A subtle, complex iconographic plot, which has been attributed to the Pisa-born Domenico Cavalca, an authoritative Dominican friar who was one of the leading figures of the cultural life of the time, whose sermons serve as annotations to understand the meaning of these figures.
The attribution of the whole cycle of frescoes is controversial, and for a long time it was attributed to the second half of the fourteenth century and, lacking any real evidence, to various painters either from Florence or Bologna, Siena, Pisa. In dating it back to the first half of the century, recent studies have emphasised its deliberate dissent from Giotto’s work, and it has thus been attributed to Buonamico di Martino known as Buffalmacco: this at last gives a face to the name that was made famous by Boccaccio’s and Sacchetti’s stories as much for his sneering wit as for his talent as a painter.
With him the tendency to a crude realism and the expressivity of 13th-century painting bursts into his scenes, although they are laid out in Giotto’s manner, which also inspires his frequent use of figures placed at the edges to skilfully steer the viewer’s eyes towards the crucial episode.
The Crucifixion, which is different in its execution too, has been attributed instead to the Pisa-born Francesco Traini. The beginning of the decoration of the Cemetery must then be attributed to him. He was a direct collaborator of Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi when they were in Pisa, but he must have also been sensitive to the interpretations of Giovanni Pisano that his pupils gave in the buildings of Piazza del Duomo.
List of scenes
1 Crucifixion, Francesco Traini
2 Resurrection, Bonamico Buffalmacco
3 Saint Thomas’s unbelief, Bonamico Buffalmacco
4 Ascension, Bonamico Buffalmacco
5 Triumph of Death, Bonamico Buffalmacco
6 Last Judgement, Bonamico Buffalmacco
7 Hell, Bonamico Buffalmacco
8 Stories of the Holy Fathers, Bonamico Buffalmacco
9 Our Lady of the Assumption, Stefano da Firenze
