Una lauda dipinta : gli affreschi di Buffalmacco nel Camposanto di Pisa e la devozione dei disciplinati

This contribution offers a new hypothesis for the genesis and function of Buon- amico Buffalmacco’s famous fresco cycle in the southern gallery of the Campo- santo di Pisa. It begins by reconsidering the commission of the sepulchral monu- ment to hermit and frater penitentie Giovanni Cini (1270 –1335), which can be attributed ab initio to a flagellant confraternity. It then argues that Buffalmacco’s frescoes – which are spatially and semantically close to Cini’s tomb – should be read in correspondence with the devotional practices and funerary paraliturgy of the Pisan Companies of the Disciplined, who frequented the monumental ceme- tery from as early as 1343. It seems likely that the cycle would have served as an iconographic reference for the texts that were performed in the ceremonial con- text of a burial: the so-called laudes pro defunctis. The central themes in these texts – the destructive and equalizing power of death, the threat of eternal con- demnation for sinners and the consequent call to penance – overlap significantly with the key subjects dealt with in the first two panels of Buffalmacco’s ‘triptych’ mural. Even the Thebaid can likewise be inserted coherently into a devotional path of a disciplinati sort: spurred on by the pastoral work of the mendicant or- ders, the lay brothers held the desert fathers as exemplars, and gave them and their experiences of corporal mortification and escape from worldly life cultic centrality.