Reply #25: #2 Cimabue [View All]

http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2010/06/florence-from-craft-to-art-part-2.html
Time has not been kind to the work of Cenni di Pepi, better known as Cimabue, a nickname in old Florentine dialect meaning “ox-head.” His great painted cross that once stood on the tramezzo of Santa Croce in Florence was severely damaged in the 1966 flood. Some of his frescoes in the ceiling vaults of the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi vanished forever in the disastrous 1997 earthquake.
Vasari began his Lives of the Great Italian Painters and Sculptors with Cimabue. He considered Cimabue’s career to be the beginning of the grand progress of Florentine (and thus Italian) art toward the High Renaissance summit. Cimabue was not a beginning, but an end. Cimabue was the last great master of the centuries long Italo-Byzantine style. He was one of the great conservatives of art, breathing new life into traditional formats. His work combines the expressive emotionalism of Coppo with the grandeur of form created in Rome. Even in its now ruined state, the Santa Croce cross has a tragic emotionalism expressed through abstract form that comes out of Coppo.


http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_CijcaA9yq58/TCKcQsbV2-I/AAAAAAAAGFc/wil_CQF8roI/s400/Cimabue,+Santa+Croce+Cross+before+flood.jpg
Cimabue, Painted Cross from Santa Croce, Florence, ca. 1285 (as the cross appeared before the 1966 flood)