100. Giovanni da Milano,
Scenes from the Life of the Virgin,
Rinuccini Chapel, Basilica of Santa Croce,
Florence (Italy), 1365. Fresco. In situ.

 

 

Painting in Pisa

In terms of spiritual significance, dramatic power of creation and passion in diverse expression, all of the abovementioned images are surpassed by the Triumph of Death that an unknown painter created on the inner south wall of the Camposanto in Pisa, a hall built by Giovanni Pisano that encloses the cemetery on three sides. This work is one of the most remarkable testimonies to Italian medieval painting, which demonstrates a brave imagination of no lesser artistic value than Dante’s work. It shows the pathos of death with the joys of human existence and life’s pleasures the way it would be praised in the poems of Giovanni Boccaccio. On the left of the painting is a noble hunting party with three kings at its head riding through a dark forest. They suddenly stop in front of three open coffins, which hold three partially decomposed corpses in royal attire. They obviously remind the living of the impermanence of earthly majesty and as a warning against pride and vanity. Death is already behind them, and no earthly greatness can stop its annihilation. In the form of a woman with bat wings and claws, which heighten the eerie scene, death swoops through the air with a scythe past a group of beggars and cripples, who in vain ask for death to release them from their misery. Piles of corpses, out of which angels and devils extract souls, mark the path of Death who steers her flight towards a little forest, where a company of well dressed women and men are delighting in merry entertainment. Death has chosen her next victims: the young loving couple on the left side; above their heads hover the angels of death, which the artist modelled on ancient embossments on sarcophagi.

 

The artist comes from the circle of Pisa painters, among whom Francesco Traini, who worked between 1321 and 1363, was the most significant. Maybe he was the creator of the Triumph of Death and the Last Judgement that is beside it. Both images were the first to outline the greatest of all dramas. In the following two centuries its artistic design would be perfected until it found its ultimate perfection in the works of Michelangelo.