Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/29

1302] wood, and by the side of the attendant angels a full-length figure of St. Francis appears on the wall. Cimabue's hand may be also recognised in the angels in the triforium of the Upper Church and in a large Crucifixion on the wall of the south transept. This last-named fresco is completely ruined, but in the figures grouped around the Cross, and the gestures of the weeping angels who hover in the air, we trace the first attempts to render natural feeling, the first crude efforts of native Italian art to break through the trammels of Byzantine tradition. Both here and in the tempera altar-pieces we recognise the spark of vitality which Cimabue was the first to introduce in Florentine painting, and which explains the great reputation which he enjoyed among his contemporaries. A proud and arrogant man, as he is described by Dante's oldest commentator, Cimabue lived to experience the vanity of earthly renown, and to see his fame eclipsed by that of his young scholar.

The last works of Cimabue were executed at Pisa, where he painted some frescoes in the hospital of Santa Chiara, and, in 1302, received a sum in payment, at the rate of ten soldi a day, for a mosaic of a colossal St. John on the vault of the Duomo. Soon afterwards he died, and was buried within the newly raised walls of his friend Arnolfo's Duomo, where a Latin epitaph was inscribed upon his tomb, saying that in his lifetime Cimabue held the field in paintings and now holds the stars of Heaven.

As an artist, Cimabue was distinctly inferior to his