Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
74/335 page 38
![Christian Museum of the Vatican which are not lacking in originality and power. Lorenzetti’s great work was in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where, with his brother Ambrogio, he painted the remarkable series of frescoes: The Last Judgment the Triumph of Death, and He'll.] This seems the proper place to give a more detailed account of one of the most extraordinary and interesting monuments of the middle ages. The Campo Santo of Pisa, like the cathe- dral at Assisi, was an arena in which the best artists of the time were summoned to try their powers; but the influence of the frescoes in the Campo Santo on the progress and develop- ment of Art was yet more direct and important than that of the paintings in the church of Assisi. The Campo Santo,1 once a cemetery, though no longer used as such, is an open space of about four hundred feet in length and one hundred and eighteen feet in breadth, inclosed with high walls, and an arcade, something like the cloisters of a monastery or cathedral, running all round it. On the east side is a large chapel, and on the north two smaller chapels, where prayers and masses are celebrated for the repose of the dead. The open space was filled with earth brought from the Holy Land by the merchant-ships of Pisa, which traded to the Levant in the days of its commercial splendor. This open space, once sown with graves, is now covered with green turf. At the four corners are four tall cypress-trees, their dark, mon- umental, spiral forms contrasting with a little lowly cross in the centre, round which ivy or some other creeping plant has wound a luxuriant bower. The beautiful Gothic arcade was designed and built about 1283 by Giovanni Pisano, the son of the great Niccolo Pisano already mentioned. This arcade, on the side next the burial-ground, is pierced by sixty-two win- dows of elegant tracery divided from each other by slender pilasters; upwards of six hundred sepulchral monuments of the nobles and citizens of Pisa are ranged along the marble pavements, and mingled with them are some antique remains of great beauty, which the Pisans in former times brought from the Greek Isles. Here also is seen the famous sarcopha- gus which first inspired the genius of Niccolb Pisano, and in which had been deposited the body of Beatrice, mother of the 1 The Campo Santo or “ Holy Field ” is the generic name of a cemetery in Italy.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0074.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
