Cimabue: The Life of Cimabue, Florentine Painter [c. 1240-1302?]
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Nowhere does the local patriotism of Florentine writers more powerfully manifest itself than in their accounts of early Tuscan artists. Since the latter half of the fifteenth century there has been a succession of writers who have sought to prove that the whole credit of the revival of the art of painting in Italy belonged to Florence. "It became an axiom with Tuscan historians that every great artist" in Siena or "in northern Italy about whose artistic education they knew little or nothing must have been initiated into the art of painting in Florence," and that every important early picture or fresco that could not be proved to be by an artist of another school was by a Florentine master. They were not content with hymning the mighty genius of Giotto, for Giotto had contemporaries of other schools, who, though lesser men, were also innovators. They were anxious to show that, in the thirteenth century, when all was darkness elsewhere, the new light was already shining in the city by the Arno. Consequently at the commencement of the fifteenth century it became the fashion to magnify Cimabue, to antedate his career, and to attribute all early Tuscan pictures of merit to him. Cimabue was held up to admiration as the Father of Italian painting. The evidence of contemporary documents and early references to Cimabue do not at all justify the prejudiced statements of patriotic Florentines. The evidence of documents only proves that he helped to execute the much-restored Majestas of the Pisa Duomo, and that he painted a picture of S. Chiara at Pisa, a work which has since been lost. Dante indeed tells us that Cimabue held the field in painting before Giotto; but Dante, exile though he was, was deeply imbued with Florentinism, and was prone to exaggerate the achievements of his friends and of his friends' friends. If Dante did not know Cimabue personally, as an early tradition relates, he was a friend of Giotto, and both his Florentinism and his friendship with Cimabue's pupil Giotto led him no doubt to magnify the importance of the older master's achievement. Dante, like a true Florentine, had a strong prejudice against the Sienese and all their works. He probably knew little or nothing of the achievement of the few great masters of the Roman proto-Renaissance. Dante's mention of Cimabue proves nothing more than that that artist was the greatest Florentine painter in the years that immediately preceded Giotto's recognition as a great painter, that is, in the concluding years of the thirteenth century. The early commentators on Dante add but a little personal anecdote as comment upon the poet's brief allusion to the master. Ghiberti, writing a century after Cimabue's death, merely makes a passing mention of him as one of the painters in the Greek manner. It was not until the beginning of the fifteenth century that the Cimabue legend began to assume definite shape. At the time of the Renaissance, Florentines began to take a deeper interest in the achievements of great Florentines, began to write "Lives" of them in imitation of the classical biographers. And as the golden age of Italian art began to wane, the voice of the art-critic and the art-historian began to be heard in the land. Florence was eager to show that her sons had led the way in the revival of the art of painting. She soon gained the ear of the civilised world, and persuaded men to take the achievement of the early Florentine painters at her own valuation. Early in the sixteenth century Albertini gave the first list of Cimabue's works, a heterogeneous catalogue of pictures by various artists, and the writer of the Book of Antonio Billi put before the world the embryo Cimabue legend. Out of this material, and the scanty references of earlier writers, Vasari constructed his amazing biography of Cimabue. The earlier of the "Lives" of the Aretine writer, his biographies of Giotto and Duccio, of Agostino di Giovanni, and Agnolo di Ventura, are full of inaccuracies, improbable anecdotes, and stories which have been proved to be inventions. But his life of Cimabue is the most unveracious of all of them. He did not even know the painter's name. He did not know the name of his family. He did not know the date of his death. He did not know the date of his authentic works at Pisa. But to Vasari his imagination was a very present help in time of trouble. In his anxiety to exalt his hero by depreciating his contemporaries and predecessors, he began his biography with one of the most astounding of the many extraordinary misrepresentations to be found in his great work. "The overwhelming flood of evils by which unhappy Italy had been submerged and devastated," he writes, "had not only destroyed whatever could properly be called buildings, but, a still more deplorable consequence, had totally exterminated the artists themselves, when, by the will of God, in the year 1240 Giovanni Cimabue, of the noble family of that name, was born in the city of Florence to give light to the art of painting." This sentence contains at least four errors upon plain matters of fact. To comment upon them is quite unnecessary. As we think upon Vasari's statement there rise before us the noblest works of the greatest school of architecture that modern Italy has produced, the school that arose in Vasari's own Tuscany, but not in Florence. We see Pisa Cathedral; the cathedral of Lucca and San Michele in that city; and S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia. I see, too, the noble abbeys of Tuscany built under French influence, S. Galgano in the Valley of the Merse, and S. Antimo, near Montalcino. And not only had Tuscany produced great architects in the Middle Ages: before Cimabue rose to preeminence there were flourishing schools of painting in Siena, Pisa, and Florence.
The endless flood of misfortunes which swept over and drowned the wretched country of Italy had not only destroyed everything that could really be called a building but, even more importantly, had completely wiped out its population of artists, when, in the year 1240, as God willed it, there was born in the city of Florence to the Cimabue, a noble family of those times, a son Giovanni, also named Cimabue,* who shed first light upon the art of painting. While he was growing up, he was judged by his father and others to have a fine, sharp mind, and he was sent to Santa Maria Novella to a master, a relative who was teaching grammar there to the novices, so that he could be trained in letters. But instead of paying attention to his literary studies, Cimabue, as if inspired by his nature, spent the whole day drawing men, horses, houses, and various other fantasies in his books and papers. And Fortune was favourable to his natural inclination, because some Greek painters were summoned to Florence by the rulers of the city for no other purpose than to revive in Florence the art of painting which was at that time not so much in disarray as completely lost. Among the other projects they undertook in the city, they began the Gondi Chapel, which can be seen in Santa Maria Novella where it is located next to the principal chapel, even though its vaults and its walls have been almost completely consumed by the ravages of time. And so Cimabue made a beginning in the art which pleased him, often staying away from school to spend the entire day in observing those masters in their work. As a result, both his father and those painters judged him to be so skilled in painting that he could hope to be quite successful if he were to devote himself to this profession, and it was no small satisfaction for Cimabue that his father was in agreement with them. And continuous practice so greatly enhanced his natural talent that in a short time he far surpassed in both design and colouring the style of the masters who taught him, who cared little about making any progress, and who fashioned their works in the way we see them today: that is, not in the fine, ancient style of Greece but rather in that awkward, modern style of their times.* And although Cimabue imitated these Greeks, he greatly improved upon their painting, removing from it a good deal of their awkwardness; he honoured his native city with his name and the works he created, such as the altar dossal at Santa Cecilia and a panel of Our Lady in Santa Croce, which was and is still suspended from one of the pillars at the right side of the choir. Afterwards, he did a small panel against a gold background of Saint Francis, and he drew him, as best he knew how, from Nature--which was a novel thing in those times--and around the saint he painted all the stories of his life in twenty little pictures filled with small figures against a gold background. Having then undertaken a large panel for the monks of Vallombrosa in the abbey of Santa Trímita in Florence, he worked diligently in order to justify the fame he had already earned; he demonstrated in this work greater powers of invention along with a beautiful style in the pose of a Madonna whom he depicted holding Her son in Her arms, while a multitude of angels surrounded Her in adoration against a gold background. When this panel was completed, it was placed by the monks on the high altar of their church. Later removed from this location in order to make room for the panel by Alesso Baldovinetti that remains there today, it was placed in a minor chapel on the left side of this church. Then, working in fresco at the hospital of the Porcellana on the corner of the Via Nuova which leads into Borgo Ognissanti, Cimabue painted an Annunciation on one side of the faÇade with the main door in the middle, and on the other, Jesus Christ with Cleophas and Luke in life-size figures; he abandoned the old methods in this work and made the draperies, garments, and other things a bit more alive, more natural, and softer than the style of those Greeks, whose works were full of lines and profiles both in mosaics and in paintings. Their rough, awkward, and commonplace style, owing nothing to study, had been taught according to custom by one artist to another for many, many years without the painters of those times ever thinking of improving their design by the beauty of colouring or some other innovation.
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