Medieval World
Cimabue (1240–1302)
Italian Italo-Byzantine painter.
Cimabue (born Cenni di Pepo, c. 1240–1302) was the towering Florentine painter of the late Duecento, the last great master of the Italo-Byzantine 'Greek manner' (maniera greca) and the first to begin loosening it toward life. Working in gold-ground panel and monumental fresco, he inherited the solemn, patterned vocabulary of Byzantine art — hieratic scale, flattened faces striped with gold, frontal enthroned Madonnas — and within it began to model faces and drapery with a new suggestion of weight and tenderness.
His surviving works are among the grandest of their age: the Santa Trinita Maestà for the Florentine church of Santa Trinita, the huge painted Crucifix for Santa Croce, and the frescoed Maestà in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi, where the enthroned Virgin turns toward a gaunt, watchful St Francis. In the Crucifix especially, the Christus patiens sags in an S-curve of real bodily suffering — Byzantine formula bending toward observed grief.
Cimabue's lasting fame rests as much on what came after him as on his own panels. Dante, writing within a generation, made him the emblem of art's fleeting glory, eclipsed by his supposed pupil Giotto; Vasari later spun the tradition that Cimabue discovered the shepherd-boy Giotto drawing sheep on a stone and took him as apprentice. Whether or not the master-pupil story is literally true, it fixed Cimabue in memory as the threshold figure — the one who held the field until a greater came.
The words the record keeps using: solemn, hieratic, grave, majestic, austere, reverent.
At a glance
- Lived 1240–1302
- Origin Italian
- Worked in Florence
- Era Medieval World
- Movements Italo-Byzantine Painting
- Mediums Fresco, Egg tempera on panel
- Techniques Buon fresco, Tempera hatching, Gold ground and assist
Works in the archive
- Maestà of Assisi (Madonna Enthroned with the Child, St Francis and Four Angels), 1285 (Lower Church of San Francesco, Assisi)
A frescoed Maestà in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi: the Virgin enthroned with the Christ Child amid four angels, and at the right the earliest and most famous image of St Francis of Assisi — a thin,… - Crucifix of Santa Croce, 1288 (Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce, Florence)
A monumental painted crucifix for the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, showing the dead Christ (Christus patiens) hanging in a great sagging curve, his body pulled to one side by its own weight. It was catastrophically… - Santa Trinita Maestà (Maestà of Santa Trinita), 1290 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
The Virgin sits enthroned in majesty with the blessing Christ Child, flanked by tiers of angels, above four half-length Old Testament prophets set in niches in the throne's base. Painted for the Florentine church of…
What was said
Credette Cimabue ne la pittura / tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, / sì che la fama di colui è scura.
Vasari opens his Lives with Cimabue as the man who gave the first light to painting, still working in the crude Byzantine 'Greek manner' of his day yet beginning to lead art back toward the imitation of nature.
Vasari recounts the tradition that Cimabue, passing through the countryside, found the shepherd-boy Giotto drawing one of his sheep on a flat stone, and, marvelling, took him into his workshop — the story by which later ages made Cimabue the master of the man who would eclipse him.
Lineage
Passed on to Giotto di Bondone
What would Cimabue make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Cimabue", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Cimabue · Keep a life moment the way Cimabue would · Pictures made after Cimabue