Francesco Traini was an Italian painter who was documented as working from 1321 to ''ca'' 1365 in

Pisa Pisa ( , or ) is a city and ''comune'' in Tuscany, central Italy, straddling the Arno just before it empties into the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa. Although Pisa is known worldwide for its leaning tower, the cit ...

and Bologna. He appears to have been a follower of

Andrea Orcagna Andrea di Cione di Arcangelo (c. 1308 – 25 August 1368), better known as Orcagna, was an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect active in Florence. He worked as a consultant at the Florence Cathedral and supervised the construction of the fa ...

to judge by only one work known to be by Traini: in 1345 he signed and dated a polyptych of the Pisan church of S. Caterina, showing

Saint Dominic Saint Dominic ( es, Santo Domingo; 8 August 1170 – 6 August 1221), also known as Dominic de Guzmán (), was a Castilian Catholic priest, mystic, the founder of the Dominican Order and is the patron saint of astronomers and natural scientis ...

and a predella showing eight hagiographic scenes from the saint's life, now in the Museo Nazionale, Pisa. Most scholars attribute many of the huge

fresco Fresco (plural ''frescos'' or ''frescoes'') is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly laid ("wet") lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the dry-powder pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaste ...

es of the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa to Traini, including the ''Last Judgement'', ''Inferno'', ''Legends of the Hermits'' and, the famous ''Il Trionfo della Morte'' (the Triumph of Death). There are Traini paintings at the Princeton University Art Museum, Ackland Art Museum, and an ''Allegorical Representation of Crucifixion with Saints Andrew and Paul'' at the Carnegie Art Museum.

''Triumph of Death''

Though other scholars attribute it to Buonamico Buffalmacco, the ''Trionfo della Morte'' was used by the art historian Millard Meiss in 1951 as a fundamental example (the other being

's "

Strozzi Altarpiece The ''Adoration of the Magi'' is a painting by the Italian painter Gentile da Fabriano. The work, housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, is considered his finest work, and has been described as "the culminating work of International Got ...

") to prove his theory on the influence of the

Black Death The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causi ...

on contemporary spirituality. He believed the painting, which displays the merciless omnipresence of death, to be a reaction to the horrors of the black death of 1348, as was the contemporaneous '' Totentanz'' ("Dance of Death") paintings in Germany. However, this fresco cycle was re-dated by Polzer to 1333-36 because of French contemporary paintings inspired by these ones and because of its Guelph political meaning, and Pisa was only Guelph for a short period in the mid 1330s; this meant, of course, that the frescoes cannot be an example of post-Black Death art as Meiss had originally suggested. In fact, since the painting was originally on the exterior wall of the town cemetery in Pisa, its function was just that of reminding the viewer of the certainty of death and the need for salvation through the church. The imagery is not, then, influenced by recent suffering and death caused by the plague but by mortality. Designed by a member of the Dominican College at Pisa, the fresco reflects the ideals of the order and its emphasis on judgement and the need for people to turn away from the temptations of the world; it promotes Mendicant poverty and cautions against earthly pleasure. It articulates a view of society, put forward by the Dominican Order in which sinfulness is the cause of suffering. The background space is not treated naturalistically but establishes divisions between the different, symbolic groups of figures. Each spatial zone refers to a different idea being communicated such as temptation, judgment, death, and suffering. The landscape is treated symbolically. The rocky area represents the hermit's asceticism while the fertile area earthly pleasures. American historian Barbara Tuchman examined the Traini fresco and described it thus: "A scroll warns that 'no shield of wisdom or riches, nobility or prowess' can protect them from the blows of the Approaching One. 'They have taken more pleasure in the world than in things of God.' In a heap of corpses nearby lie crowned rulers, a Pope in tiara, a knight, tumbled together with the bodies of the poor, while angels and devils in the sky contend for the miniature naked figures that represent their souls."Barbara Tuchman, ''The Black Plague''
, accessed May 6, 2010 The frescoes of the Camposanto were unfortunately either severely damaged or destroyed by Allied air raids in World War II.

References

* *John White: ''Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400''. Pelican History of Art 1993

External links

The Triumph of Death
Page about historian Barbara Tuchman's analysis of the Traini fresco {{DEFAULTSORT:Traini, Francesco 14th-century Italian painters Italian male painters Painters from Tuscany People from Pisa Italian Renaissance painters