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Updated: June 14, 2025
Francis in the church of S. Croce, an excellent picture of St. Cecilia, in that of S. Stefano, and a Madonna in the convent of S. Paolino at Florence. There are also two paintings by Cimabue in the Louvre the Virgin with angels, and the Virgin with the infant Jesus. Others are attributed to him, but their authenticity is very doubtful.
Sumner's invitation all sat on the steps in a sunny corner while he talked of Cimabue, the first great name in the history of Italian painting, the man who was great enough to dare attempt to change conditions that existed in his time, which was the latter part of the thirteenth century.
In the Madonna by Cimabue, which, if it be not the earliest after the revival of art, was one of the first in which the Byzantine manner was softened and Italianized, we have six grand, solemn-looking angels, three on each side of the throne, arranged perpendicularly one above another.
In sculpture they were much indebted to the ancients, but painting seems to have been purely a development. In the Middle Ages it was comparatively rude. No noted painter arose until Cimabue, in the middle of the thirteenth century.
This is the year that Cimabue was three years old; Niccola Pisano had lived during its building, Amiens was finished forty-six years later, and Orvieto was begun thirty-six years later. It is literally the earliest specimen of so advanced and complete a museum of sculpture in the West.
They all paint better than Giotto and Cimabue, in some respects better than Perugino; but they paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest, and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more. Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn away readily from his pictures.
Cimabue drew from nature to the best of his powers, although it was a novelty to do so in those days, and he made the draperies, garments, and other things somewhat more life-like, natural, and soft than the Greeks had done, who had taught one another a rough, awkward, and commonplace style for a great number of years, not by means of study but as a matter of custom, without ever dreaming of improving their designs by beauty of colouring or by any invention of worth.
Perhaps amidst the many thousand subjects found in tombs and temples between Philoe and Cairo, one or two may be treated with nearly as much skill as was exhibited by the Italian painters before the time of Cimabue except that scarcely an attempt even is made at grouping or composition. Nor must it be supposed that the Egyptian school was in course of development.
Cimabue and Duccio are the last great exponents in the West of the greater tradition the tradition that held the essential everything and the accidental nothing. For with Duccio, at any rate, the sense of form was as much traditional as vital: and the great Cimabue is fin de siècle. They say that Cimabue died in 1302; Duccio about fifteen years later. For Giotto could be intentionally second-rate.
But as, in painting, Margheritone and Cimabue, standing between the old and the new styles, exhibit rather a vague striving than a fulfilled attainment, so is it with these poets. There is little that is distinguishingly individual in them.
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