Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass, and was the first, according to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.
Giovanni Cimabue,[45] of noble lineage, was an architect and painter. He is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected till the subsequent century; he should have assigned them another chapel under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253, when he was in his thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that fabric.
The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in passing through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with something of a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since. Vast and comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and Santa Trinità of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he displayed in the upper church of Assisi--meteors of the age in which he lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.