CIMABUE, che'ma-biVitt. GIOVANNI ( c.1240 c.1302). The first great painter of the Revival in Italy. lie was born in Florence and belonged to a noble family, hut of his studies nothing definite is known. Vasari believes that he learned painting of some Byzantine artists established in Florence. While he certainly felt the Byzan tine influence, then paramount in Italy, it has recently been discovered that he resided for a while in Rome (12721, which was the centre of an Italian artistic revival. (See COSMATI.) Ci malice was the first Italian—at least, the first Tuscan—to give individual life. graee, and move ment to his figures; to soften the lines of drap er•. while maintaining a dignity and religious feeling often absent from the work of his sue eessor, Giotto. Two remarkable pictures in Florence are usually attributed to him, both of them representing the Madonna and Child en throned, attended by angels: one at t-;'anta Maria Novella, the other in the Belle Arti. Vasari re lates that the former excited so much admira tion that King Charles of Anjou visited the artist's studio and the picture was carried in triumphal procession to the church. The Na tional Gallery in London has a picture, and the Louvre in Paris has another, attributed credibly to this master; but they are not so important as those in Florence, or as the fifth picture of the same subject (a fresco) in Assisi. It was
in his extensive series of frescoes he Saint Fran cis, Assisi, that Cimabuc developed his powers to their fullest, leaving left behind him his stiff early manner of the Belle _\rti work, and even his second Sienese manner of the Santa Maria Novella picture, for the softer and more classic style learned in Rome from such works as the San Clemente and other later frescoes. The Church of Saint Francis was the Mecca of early Italian painters. It is there that we can study the beginning of the Revival: the best Roman, Umbrian, and Tuscan painters of the second half of the thirteenth century covered both the Upper and Lower churches with an unparalleled cycle of religious compositions. Here Cimabue left his best works, in the Upper Church. Ac cording to Vasari, Cimalme was Giotto's master; but this, like so many of his statements about early artists, cannot be relied upon. Consult: Strzvgowski, Cimabue and Rona (Vienna, 1888) ; Forbes-Robertson, "Cimabue" in Great Painters of Christendom (London, 1$7i).