BUFFALMACCO, Bounamico
(active 1315-1336)

Triumph of Death (detail)

1335-40
Fresco
Camposanto, Pisa

This expansive painting does not tell a coherent story. Rather it consists of many different scenes and exempla in which the contrast between the enjoyment of life and death, between embracing reality and fleeing from it, is shown very suggestively, without requiring that the pictures be read in a certain sequence.

At the bottom right part of the painting, the group of finely dressed men and women disporting themselves in a paradisal garden forms the antithesis to the scene of the crippled and dead in the middle of the painting and is at the same time a pendant to the courtly hunting party at the left.