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By Root 2846 0

think of painters, at any time during the Renaissance, as prisoners of collective forces. The best of them, particularly, were highly individualistic, laws unto themselves. Cimabue (c. 1240– 1302), the first of them, set the pattern. He was known as “Ox Head.” He was proud, obstinate, highly motivated and absolutely determined to do what he thought right. Dante says that he took no notice of criticism. What Cimabue was trying to do, especially in the frescoes of the sanctuary and crossing at the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, was to absorb all that was valuable in the recent revival of Roman-style art among the Byzantines—new gestures and movements, tones and presentational tricks with vestments and background— while rejecting its suffocating tendency to freeze innovations into canonical devices, and to repeat. The Orthodox Church had a paralyzing tendency to tell artists what was the “correct” way to render holy personages, as well as to limit the range of permitted subjects, something Roman Catholicism did not do until the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Cimabue fought against this. He was a dramatic man, who painted with great power and sometimes with a touch of the sensational.

This comes through occasionally in his work at Assisi, despite its dreadful condition, which was bad enough even before the earthquake of 1997. In the lower walls of the transepts there is a scene of the destruction of Babylon that makes the hair stand on end and a glorious view of St. Mary Magdalen lamenting, an image of grief that alone would differentiate Cimabue from the unadventurous medieval talent that nurtured his genius. He also worked in mosaic, and there is a rendering of St. John, in the apse of Pisa Cathedral, which shows a new elegance and sympathy in this stiffest of all techniques, which the Italian artists of the West wisely, as a rule, left to the Byzantines. The difficulty with Cimabue, as with other masters of the early Renaissance, is that their innovations quickly became routine, even clichés, as later artists absorbed and repeated them.

All the same, there was a big leap from Cimabue to Giotto di Bondone, a leap of more than the twenty-seven years that separated their births. Opinion in Italy followed Dante’s judgment, and later critics, looking back, saw Giotto as “the beginning” of something entirely new in painting. Matteo Palmieri, writing in the 1430s, referred to painting “before Giotto” as “the lifeless mistress of laughable figures.” It was “full of amazing stupidities” before Giotto “resurrected” it. We see in the best portions of his work in the Arena Chapel at Padua (1303–6)—the Lamentation, for instance, the Betrayal of Christ and Joachim and the Shepherd—the emergence of genuine pictures as we understand them today, with figures intelligently and skillfully grouped, located clearly in space and in surroundings that bear some resemblance to the actual world. In Joachim the trees are absurd and the sheep are ratlike, but the dog is real and the shepherds are people one can actually see tending their flocks on the hillside. Both the Betrayal and the Lamentation convey deep intensity of feeling, expressed in anxious, convulsed and tearful faces that one recognizes from the street and the fields of common life. Two decades later, in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels at Santa Croce in Florence, and possibly in the Upper Church at Assisi, Giotto was painting his figures with greater freedom and facility—they have grace as well as motion—and he placed them within increasingly complex perspective settings, so that there is considerable depth within the composition. For the first time since antiquity, the onlooker can step into the scene and feel at home there. Giotto’s work has fared better than Cimabue’s, but his later masterpieces, which were the ones that most impressed his contemporaries and successors, have not survived. Later artists tended to place him at the head of the apostolic succession of great painters, the man who had annihilated the Byzantine manner and made nature his model—this last is