Buonamico Buffalmacco
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.
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.
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