Dante Alighieri identified among the damned in 14th-century Pisa fresco

Professor Giulia Ammannati of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa has identified Dante Alighieri as the red-clad figure in Buonamico Buffalmacco's 14th-century fresco at the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa. The fresco, part of a Last Judgment scene painted between 1336 and 1341, shows archangels driving sinners into Hell. Among them, a man in red closely resembles Giotto's portrait of Dante in the Bargello chapel in Florence. Ammannati's hypothesis, published in a forthcoming article in the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore, is based not only on physical resemblance but also on historical-political context: the bitter conflict between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Dante's political treatise De Monarchia (c. 1310) advocated for a unified Italy, angering pro-papal factions. At the time, Pisa's Archbishop Simone Saltarelli had taken refuge with Pope John XXII in Avignon after the invasion of Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who installed Antipope Nicholas V in Pisa. The archbishop and local Dominicans likely influenced Buffalmacco to place Dante among the damned. The figure next to Dante, a bearded man, may be Virgil, also condemned for his medieval reputation as a magician. Ammannati previously gained attention in 2019 for reconstructing two hexameters in which Bonanno Pisano claimed to have built the Leaning Tower of Pisa.