Buonamico Buffalmacco

Who is Buonamico Buffalmacco?

Buonamico di [son of] Martino or Buonamico Buffalmacco 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. Painted some ten years before the Black Death spread over Europe in 1348, the cycle - a "painted sermon" - 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 and Franco Sacchetti both describe Buonamico as being a practical joker. Boccaccio features Buonamico along with his friends and fellow painters Calandrino and Bruno in several tales. Typically in these stories, Buonamico uses his wits to play tricks on his friends and associates: convincing Calandrino that a stone he possesses confers invisibility, stealing a pig from Calandrino, convincing the physician Master Simone of an opportunity to ally himself with the devil, convincing Calandrino that he has become pregnant, convincing Calandrino that a particular scroll can cause a woman to fall in love with him. 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.