CIMABUE, name of a Florentine painter Cenni di Pepo active in the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century. Some Italian painters preceded Cimabue—particularly Guido of Siena and Giunta of Pisa; but though he worked on much the same principle as they, and to a like result, he was held up to admiration as the "Father of Italian Painting" by Florentine writers, inspired by local patriotism. There is no documentary evidence that a single picture attributed to Cimabue was painted by him.
His fame rested chiefly on a colossal "Madonna and Child with Angels," the largest altarpiece produced up to that date, which was painted in tempera for the chapel of the Rucellai in St. Maria Novella, Florence; but recent research has proved this work to be by the Siennese Duccio.
Among paintings still extant attributed to Cimabue are the fol lowing :—In the Uffizi in Florence, a "Madonna and Child," with eight angels, and some prophets in niches—better than the Ru cellai picture in composition and study of nature, but more archaic in type, and the colour now spoiled (this work was painted for the Badia of St. Trinita, Florence) ; in the National Gallery, London, a "Madonna and Child with Angels," which came from the Ugo Baldi collection, and had probably once been in the church of St. Croce, Florence; in the Louvre, a "Madonna and Child," with twenty-six medallions in the frame, originally in the church of St. Francesco, Pisa. In the lower church of the Basilica of St. Francesco at Assisi, Cimabue, succeeding Giunta da Pisa, is said to have adorned the south transept—painting a colossal "Virgin and Child between four Angels," above the altar of the Conception, and a large figure of St. Francis. In the upper church, north transept, he has the "Saviour Enthroned and some Angels," and, on the central ceiling of the transept, the "Four Evangelists with Angels." It is, however, impossible to say whether Cimabue was at Assisi or not.
In the closing years of his life he was appointed capomaestro of the mosaics of the cathedral of Pisa, and was afterwards, hardly a year before his death, joined with Arnolfo di Cambio as architect for the Cathedral of Florence. In Pisa he executed a Majesty in the apse—"Christ in glory between the Virgin and John the Evangelist," a mosaic, now much damaged. This was probably the last work that he produced.
He was the master of Giotto, whom (is the tradition) he found a shepherd boy of ten, in the pastures of Vespignano, draw ing with a coal on a slate the figure of a lamb. Cimabue took him to Florence, and instructed him in the art ; and after Cimabue's death Giotto occupied a house which had belonged to his master in the Via del Cocomero. Another painter with whom Cimabue is said to have been intimate was Gaddo Gaddi.
Giovanni Cimabue was buried in the cathedral of Florence, St. Maria del Fiore, with an epitaph written by one of the Nini: Credidit ut Cimabos picturae castra tenere, Sic tenuit vivens ; nunc tenet astra poli.
Here we recognize distinctly a parallel to the first clause in the famous triplet of Dante: Credette Cimabue nella pintura Tener lo Campo ; ed ora ha Giotto it grido, Si the la fama di colui' oscura.