Cimabue

CIMABUE. - Cenni di Pepo, called C., Florentine painter, b. ca. 1240. The documents tell us only that in 1272 he was in Rome, that in 1301 he undertook to execute, in collaboration with the Lucchese Giovanni d'Apparecchiato, a panel with the Maestà for the church of S. Chiara in Pisa, and that in 1302 he was working on a mosaic figure of St. John in the apse basin of the cathedral, also in Pisa, where he died in that year. Much fuller information about his activity is provided by Vasari, but the first and most important testimony about the painter is constituted by the very famous Dantean tercet (Purg., XI, 94-96): where, however, Dante, noting that «the fame of him is dark», does not seem so much to allude to the oblivion into which the painter's name would have fallen, whose art had been surpassed by Giotto's new manner, as to the rapid passage of the figure of the older master from history into myth: for his fame still endured. The historicism of the last century, with its rigid criticism of the sources and of the Vasarian text, seemed to confirm Dante's intuition, and, despairing of reconstructing C.'s work, went so far as to doubt the very existence of this artist (Wickhoff, Richter, Douglas). It is to modern criticism that the merit belongs of having restored a complete physiognomy to this name that had by then become legendary. On the stylistic foundation of the master's only work whose authenticity is documentarily established (the mosaic St. John for the cathedral of Pisa), it has constituted a group of paintings (panels, frescoes and mosaics) sufficiently homogeneous to enlighten us on the artistic development of a personality by now well defined and unmistakable.

The most reliable succession of the works certainly by C. would be the following: two Stories of Joseph and Imposition of the Name on the Baptist, mosaic scenes in the cupola of the baptistery of Florence (only in some parts is C.'s intervention recognizable); Painted Cross on panel in the church of S. Domenico at Arezzo; frescoes in the presbytery and in the transept of the upper basilica of S. Francesco at Assisi

(depicting the four Evangelists in the vault of the presbytery, the Stories of the Virgin in the choir, the Apocalyptic Scenes and a large Crucifixion in the left arm of the transept and Stories of the apostles Peter and Paul and a Crucifixion in the right arm of the transept), much damaged, and a Madonna between four angels and St. Francis, much repainted, in the transept of the lower basilica; the large panel with the Madonna enthroned with the Child, eight angels and four prophets, formerly in the church of S. Trinita in Florence, now in the Uffizi gallery; the panel with the Madonna enthroned with the Child and six angels, formerly in S. Francesco in Pisa, now in the Louvre; the Painted Cross on panel in the museum of the Opera di S. Croce in Florence and the aforementioned mosaic St. John in Pisa. A late workshop work, but with some autograph parts, is the Madonna enthroned with two angels, formerly in the church of the Servi, now in the picture gallery of Bologna.

The traditional thesis of the Byzantine origins of C.'s art has not found confirmation, in the Vasarian sense, in the recent recognition of the painter's involvement in the mosaic cycle of the dome of the Florentine Baptistery, inasmuch as modern criticism no longer judges such mosaics to be the work of Greek and Byzantine craftsmen, but rather well-defined expressions of a typically Western and Romanesque taste. C.'s Byzantinism is instead attested by the dependence of the Painted Cross of Arezzo on the models of Giunta Pisano: it was Giunta and the painters of his circle, exponents in Pisa of that orientalizing culture nourished by classical revivals which is usually defined by the name of "Byzantine neo-Hellenism," who transmitted to C. that abundant repertoire of linguistic solutions, of signs, of metaphors, of figurative symbols that compose themselves in limpid and vigorous meter in the Arezzo Crucifix: and C., almost completely immune to the neo-Hellenic grace that characterizes his contemporary Duccio di Buoninsegna, drew rather from the tradition of Byzantium those accents of solemn severity, of liturgical rigor, of somber splendor that constitute the archaic and immutable substratum of that civilization. But already in the Maestà of the Uffizi what strikes one is not so much the grandiose organic quality of the composition in which Byzantine hieraticism is concretized in an architectural construction, as the incisiveness of the line, the harsh energy of the signs and profiles that create effects of plastic relief and confer a passionate dynamism on the figures. And in the admirable, much-damaged Assisi frescoes, above all in the Crucifixion of the left transept, the forms appear stamped with the robust evidence of Romanesque plasticity, while the conventional dramatic quality of the Byzantine iconographic models appears surpassed in a tragic expressive violence that boldly unhinges the spatial construction of the scene.

With the accentuated individualism of C., the Byzantine tradition finds in Italian painting its concluding phase, while the progressive affirmation of drawing and relief over purely chromatic values (as can be seen, for example, in the late Crucifix of S. Croce) is a clear prelude to the art of Giotto. - See Pl. CIII.

Enzo Carli