In the ancient refectory of the Franciscan monastery (now the museum) attached to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, there is a fragment of a Hell fresco (fig. 1) discovered in 1942 behind an altar in the church, which is part of a "Triumph of Death" painted, say Ghiberti and Vasari, by Andrea Orcagna in the mid-14th century: "Andrea returned to Florence, where in the middle of the church of Santa Croce, on the right hand, on a vast wall, he painted the same things that he had done in the Campo Santo in Pisa, in three similar pictures..." (Vasari, "Orcagna, Painter, Sculptor, and Architect, of Florence," in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, 1568).

The fragment is hardly mentioned in the voluminous literature on Dante illustration beyond Vasari's comment, but now on public view again after four centuries, it is clearly important, both in its intrinsic merit and also in its clear relations to the Pisan Camposanto Inferno fresco (which deeply influenced all subsequent Hell iconography). The fragment certainly then belongs in the "special section" of my Illustrations to Dante's Inferno (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994) and among the dozen or so works treated in my "The Iconography of Hell" (Dante Studies, CXI, 1993, pp.53-105).

The attribution of the Camposanto "Inferno" fresco is tangled in scholarly dispute (see M. Meiss, Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, Princeton University Press, 1969, vol.1, pp. 56-70, L. Bertolini, Camposanto Monumentale di Pisa, 1960, pp. 57-9, and L. Becherucci, I Musei di Santa Croce e di Santo Spirito, 1983, pp.165-6), from the old attribution to Andrea Orcagna and his brother Nardo di Cione by Vasari (which endured for centuries), to Bernardo Daddi, to Pietro Lorenzetti, to Vitale of Bologna, to Meiss's confident, though controversial attribution to the Pisan Francesco Traini (who Vasari tells us was a pupil of Andrea Orcagna!), and finally to Buonamico Buffalmacco (whose relationship with the Orcagnas remains a question). There is little hope here of settling the issue beyond the pointing out of the fragment's many relations to the painterly tradition of Hell illustration from Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua in 1304, the Camposanto fresco in Pisa in the 1340's, the frescoes of the Orcagna brothers in Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the 1350's, and, of course, to Dante's text.

The fragment's four-tiered cave motif with the three-headed Satan at the center is strikingly similar to the Camposanto's, as are the recurring motifs of snake-entwined sinners, dragon heads swallowing up sinners, headless or otherwise dismembered sinners, sinners garroted or hacked with swords, sinners in the rich medieval robes and headgear of the aristocracy or the clergy, sinners compacted into closed spaces, prodded by grotesque devils with animal heads and protruding upper and lower teeth.

Giotto's magnificent fresco in Padua is certainly the first influence (along, of course, with Dante) on the Santa Croce fragment, laying the pattern for the sardonic, burlesque treatment of both devils and sinners, the fearless satire against grasping and lascivious courtiers and churchmen (devils bearing moneybags to the crowned, mitred, or tonsured ).

The Paradiso fresco of Andrea Orcagna and the Inferno fresco of his brother Bernardo (Nardo di Cione) in Florence's Santa Maria Novella have in the one renderings of richly gowned ladies, nuns, monks and priests, satirized then in the Santa Croce fragment by the same hand, in the other, sticks with heads and hands, clearly derived from Dante's depiction of the Suicides of Canto 13, and repeated then in the fragment. Nardo's fresco has the decapitated, mangled bodies of Dante's Schismatics of Canto 28, as do the Camposanto fresco and the Santa Croce fragment. The fragment shows two enraged men fighting with fists and knife, as two fight in the Camposanto fresco, in both cases suggested by the Wrathful of Canto 8. The bow and arrow motif in the fragment is suggested by the actions of the Centaurs of Dante's Canto 12, depicted in the Nardo fresco. The Nardo fresco throughout renders the headgear and robes of Dante's upper- class sinners, as is done also in the fragment, especially with the bedecked devil who bears the sign "Avaritia" (Judas, in the central mouth of Satan, is likewise labeled; labeling itself is a motif throughout the Camposanto fresco). The Satan of the fragment is very like the Camposanto's, with its three human faces gnawing at sinners, and a human, snake-entwined body, except that the fragment's Satan has three pairs of wings, unlike the wingless Camposanto's (and Giotto's), but like Nardo's.

The final impression one receives from a comparison of the fragment's iconography with the earlier frescoes is that the artist of the fragment--Andrea Orcagna--was deeply familiar with the Camposanto fresco and, of course, with the frescoes at Santa Maria Novella, as well as Giotto's, and with Dante's text.

Millard Meiss, who had as far back as 1933 championed Francesco Traini--as opposed to the Orcagna brothers--as the artist of the Camposanto fresco, had by 1969 rather reluctantly admitted the striking similarities in the Santa Croce fragment by Andrea Orcagna to the Camposanto fresco: "Because of the undeniable connection between the two paintings, Vasari's opinion contains a grain of truth" (op cit. p.68). Much more than a grain, I would say.