Art After the Plague
SOMETIME IN THE MID-14TH CENTURY, the Dominican friars of Pisa commissioned a series of frescoes for the Gothic portico that enclosed the city’s cemetery, the Campo Santo, or Holy Field, a landmark as striking as the neighboring cathedral and its famous leaning bell tower. A simple burial ground no longer fit the tastes of a wealthy merchant community, one of the most sophisticated cities in the late-medieval world. Along with legends about early Christian hermits, the Last Judgment, and the terrors of Hell, the cemetery’s new frescoes included a harrowing Triumph of Death. It is not entirely clear who painted this extraordinary vision—Buonamico Buffalmacco or Francesco Traini, both of whom worked on the site. Neither is it known exactly when it was executed—in 1336 or sometime after January of 1348, when the bustling port became one of Europe’s first points of arrival for the virulent pandemic known as the Black Death.
Plague is still with us, and may have been with us since Neolithic times. The disease took its 14th-century nickname from the color of gangrenous flesh, a symptom that occurred when the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas, entered the human bloodstream to cause an explosion of small clots, usually concentrated on extremities such as noses, hands, and feet. Clotting led to deadly necrosis, curable today by antibiotics. Other victims of the pestilence suffered hugely swollen, abscessed lymph glands called buboes, especially in the groin and armpits, giving Yersinia pestis its best-known name, bubonic plague. Deadlier still was the pneumonic form of plague, which developed when bacteria entered the lungs; then, victims could spread the contagion through droplets of breath or the blood they coughed forth as their lungs broke down.
Pisa lost 70 percent of its population to the Black Death. (In nearby Florence, the number of residents declined from 110,000 in 1347 to 50,000 in 1351.) The most recent restorers of the frescoes in the Campo Santo favor a date relying on an article published in 1974 that compares its somber figures with contemporaneous manuscript illuminations and sermons by Dominican friars, and that finds allusions to the political situation in Pisa at the time. The evidence, all told, is slender and subjective. There really is no parallel anywhere in 1330s Europe for the scale of Death’s devastation depicted in this fresco. A series of famines had struck the region in the late 1330s and the early 1340s, but famine distinguishes between rich and poor, whereas the triumphant Death of the Campo Santo emphatically does not. Incidentally, the frescoes were nearly destroyed when an Allied bomb struck the cemetery in 1944, incinerating the wooden roof of the monumental cloister and the beaten reeds that anchored the frescoed plaster to the building’s marble walls. Their style, what is left of it, can only be seen through a glass darkly.
