Buonamico Buffalmacco

17th-century engraving of Buffalmacco by Wenceslaus Hollar

Buonamico di Martino, otherwise known as Buonamico Buffalmacco (active c. 1315–1336), was an Italian Renaissance 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 preserved in the Campo Santo of Pisa, featuring The Three Dead and the Three Living,[1] the Triumph of Death,[2][3] the Last Judgement, the Hell, and the Thebais (several episodes from the lives of the Desert Fathers).

Painted some ten years before the Black Death spread over medieval Europe in 1348, the cycle enjoyed an extraordinary success after that date, and was often imitated throughout Italy during the Renaissance. 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 literary masterpiece The Decameron, written a few years after the spread of the Black Death (1348–1353).

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Kleiner 2016 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Aavitsland 2012 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Bellosi 2000 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).