CIMABUE

CIMABUE. — Cenni di Pepo, known as C., painter

Florentine, born c. 1240. Documents inform us only that in 1272 he was in Rome, that in 1301 he undertook, in collaboration with the Lucchese Giovanni d’Apparecchiato, to execute a panel with the *Maestà* for the church of Santa Chiara in Pisa, and that in 1302 he was working on a mosaic figure of St John in the apse of the Cathedral in Pisa, where he died that same year. Much fuller information about his activity is provided by Vasari, but the first and most important testimony concerning the painter is the well-known tercet by Dante (Purg., XI, 94–96), where, however, Dante, noting that “his fame is dim,” does not seem to allude so much to the oblivion into which the painter’s name would have fallen—his art having been surpassed by Giotto’s new manner—as to the swift transition of the older master’s figure from history to myth, for his fame still endured. Nineteenth-century historicism, with its rigid criticism of sources and of Vasari’s text, seemed to confirm Dante’s intuition and, despairing of reconstructing Cimabue’s œuvre, even went so far as to doubt the painter’s very existence (Wickhoff, Richter, Douglas). It is to modern criticism that the credit is due for having restored to this name, now become legendary, a complete profile. On the stylistic basis of the only work by the master whose authenticity is documented (the St John in mosaic for the Pisa Cathedral), it has been possible to assemble a group of paintings (panels, frescoes, and mosaics) sufficiently homogeneous to illuminate the artistic development of a personality now well-defined and unmistakable.

The most reliable sequence of works certainly by Cimabue would be as follows: two Scenes from the Life of Joseph and the Naming of the Baptist, mosaic scenes in the dome of the Baptistery of Florence (only in some parts is Cimabue’s intervention recognizable); painted Cross in the church of San Domenico in Arezzo; frescoes in the presbytery and transept of the Upper Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi (depicting the Four Evangelists on 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 Santa Trinita in Florence, now in the Uffizi Gallery; the panel with the Madonna Enthroned with the Child and six angels, formerly in San Francesco in Pisa, now in the Louvre; the painted Cross in the museum of the Opera di Santa Croce in Florence; and the aforementioned St John in mosaic in Pisa. A late workshop work, but with some autograph passages, is the Madonna Enthroned with Two Angels, formerly in the church of the Servi, now in the Pinacoteca in Bologna.

The traditional thesis of the Byzantine origins of Cimabue’s art has not found confirmation, in the Vasarian sense, in the recent recognition of the painter’s intervention in the mosaic cycle of the Florentine Baptistery dome, since modern criticism no longer judges these mosaics to be the work of Greek or Byzantine craftsmen, but rather expressions of a distinctly Western and Romanesque taste. Cimabue’s Byzantinism is instead attested by the dependence of the painted Cross in Arezzo on models by 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 “Neo-Hellenic Byzantine,” who transmitted to Cimabue that abundant repertoire of linguistic solutions, signs, metaphors, and figurative symbols which, in clear and vigorous metrics, are composed in the Arezzo Crucifix; and Cimabue, almost entirely immune from the Neo-Hellenic grace that characterizes his contemporary Duccio di Buoninsegna, drew rather from the Byzantine tradition those accents of solemn severity, liturgical rigor, and dark strength that constitute the immutable and archaic substratum of that civilization. Yet already in the *Maestà* of the Uffizi what strikes one is not so much the grandiose organic unity of the composition, in which Byzantine hieraticism is embodied 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 frescoes in Assisi, above all in the Crucifixion in the left transept, the forms appear imbued with the robust clarity of Romanesque sculpture, while the conventional dramatic quality of Byzantine iconographic models is surpassed in a tragic expressive violence that boldly dismantles the spatial construction of the scene.

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

Enzo Cefii