Inscribed "QUESTO* ELINFERNO*DEL*CHAPOSAN/TO*DI PISA*", this bizarre and impressive engraving is the earliest known engraving after a specific painting in European art. Without reversing the image, it depicts the fresco of Hell, which was part of the large cycle of murals depicting the Universal Judgement at the Campo Santo (the main cemetery) of Pisa. The fresco, now attributed to the 14th century Florentine painter Francesco Traini, was ultimately destroyed in an Allied air raid in July 1944. The engraver of the present print remains anonymous and, to our knowledge, no early impression of it appears to have survived. The plate re-appeared at the end of the 18th century, when it came into the possession of the historian Alessandro da Morrona (1741-1821), who re-printed the plate as an illustration to his guidebook Pisa illustrata, published in 1812. It seems likely that the present impression has been removed from a copy of this book, as the binding holes at left and the flattened vertical folds suggest.
The existence of the plate was last recorded in an auction in Paris in 1890.