Dante Alighieri appears in the frescoes of the Camposanto di Pisa: the discovery of the Scuola Normale
Dante Alighieri would be one of the figures represented in the frescoes that Buffalmacco he painted between 1336 and 1342 on the walls in Cemetery of Pisa. To prune it is a study conducted by the professor of Paleography Giulia Ammannati of the Normal School. In the section of the Universal Judgment of the frescoes, the archangels push a crowd of outcasts into hell and among these stands a man dressed in red and very similar to the Giottesque portrait of Dante in the Bargello (before 1337).
The question is: but why Buffalmacco would have made Dante fall to hell?
Professor Ammannati in her study is not based only on physiognomic similarities, but brings this hypothesis back to the historical-political context of the time and above all to the contrast between the Papacy and the Empire. The archbishop of Pisa, Simone Saltarelli, a close collaborator of Pope John XXII, had had to take refuge in Avignon between 1327 and 1329, in the years in which Pisa was occupied by Ludovico il Bavaro, who also installed his own antipope Niccolò VI. pro-imperial had taken arguments in their favor from a work of Dante, the De Monarchia, soon condemned to the stake by the emissaries of the Avignonese Pope. Thus the theoretical Dante of the Empire may have been stigmatized in Buffalmacco’s frescoes, in whose inspiration the Pisan Dominicans and the archbishop himself played a fundamental role. The bearded character next to him could be Virgil, banned perhaps also for his medieval fame as a magician, an accusation that struck Dante himself in the last years of his life.
The other question he finds in the study of the Normale concerns the aspect of Dante depicted by Buffalmacco in the Camposanto. Did the Pisans know him? According to the work, Saltarelli and Buffalmacco were Florentines and may have seen Dante’s portrait in the Bargello, but Ammannati also puts forward another plausible hypothesis: Dante may have stayed in Pisa for a long time in the years of Arrigo VII (1312-13), composing parts of the De Monarchia. The preaching of the Dominicans and the oral commentary on the paintings did the rest, making the story of the reprobate Dante recognizable to his contemporaries.