Cenni di Pepo, known as Cimabue, was a Florentine painter and mosaicist who stands at the crucial turning point between the formal traditions of Byzantine art and the naturalistic revolution that would follow with his pupil Giotto. Active in the second half of the thirteenth century, Cimabue worked in Florence, Rome, Assisi, and Pisa, and was recognized by Dante in the Divine Comedy as the greatest painter of his age — only to note that Giotto had already eclipsed his fame.
His monumental Maestà paintings for the churches of Santa Trinita in Florence and San Francesco in Assisi show the Virgin enthroned in golden splendour, surrounded by angels and saints. While the compositions follow Byzantine conventions — the hieratic frontality, the gold ground, the elongated figures — Cimabue introduced a new solidity and spatial depth. His angels overlap and recede; his drapery falls with a weight that suggests actual fabric; his faces show the first glimmers of individual expression.
The devastating flood of 1966 severely damaged his great painted crucifix in Santa Croce, but its surviving fragments — particularly the tender, suffering face of Christ — reveal the emotional power that set Cimabue apart from his contemporaries. His legacy is inseparable from the birth of Western painting: he pushed the boundaries of a millennium-old tradition to the point where a new art could emerge.