Cimabue
The last great Byzantine-influenced master in Florence.
Cimabue began to soften the rigid Byzantine style with greater volume and feeling. According to tradition, he discovered the young Giotto drawing sheep on a stone.
Cimabue’s real name was Cenni di Pepo, and he was born in Florence around 1240. His nickname is usually interpreted as “ox-head” or “the stubborn one”. We know almost nothing about his training. He grew up at a time when Italian painting was dominated by the Byzantine style, with flat, gleaming gold icons as its model. He is documented in Rome in 1272, and the only work that archival records securely link to him is a mosaic of St John the Evangelist in Pisa Cathedral from 1301–02.
The works attributed to him therefore rest on stylistic comparison, though scholars largely agree. They include a large painted crucifix in San Domenico in Arezzo from around 1270 and another in Santa Croce in Florence, which was badly damaged in the flood of 1966 and has become a symbol of the disaster. His best-known panel is the Santa Trinita Maestà, a huge enthroned Madonna that now hangs in the Uffizi. He also painted frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, but they are so badly deteriorated that the colours now look like a photographic negative.
Cimabue’s innovation was to bring Byzantine forms to life. The throne gains depth, the folds of the drapery begin to describe the bodies beneath, and the faces take on a grave, human expression. Christ hangs heavily on the cross, bent with pain. The gold and the elongated proportions remain, but the image points towards a real space.
Dante already mentions him in the Divine Comedy: Cimabue thought he held the field in painting, but now it is Giotto who has the cry. The line became a kind of verdict on him as the master surpassed by his successor. The story that he found the young Giotto drawing sheep on a stone comes from Giorgio Vasari two hundred years later and is a legend, not an established fact.
Even so, Vasari opened his famous Lives of the artists of 1550 with Cimabue. As a result, he was long regarded as the first Italian painter in a new tradition. Today he is seen as an important link between Byzantine icon painting and the realistic painting that Giotto went on to develop.