This picture is still in its place in the Rucellai chapel and is of course the subject of devoted attention on the part of visitors. Lafenestre says of it, that this monument of Florentine art quite justifies the enthusiasm of contemporaries if we compare it with the expressionless Madonnas that preceded it. There is an air of beneficent dignity on the features quite unlike the rigidity of preceding art, and there is besides an attractive suppleness about the attitude of the body which is far better proportioned than those of its predecessors. Above all there is a certain roseate freshness about the colors of the flesh which are pleasant substitutes for the pale and greenish tints of the Byzantines. It did not require more than this to exalt the imaginations of the people delivered from their old-time conventional painting. It was only a ray of the dawn after a dark night, but it announced a glorious sunrise of art and the confident anticipations of the wondrous day to come, aroused the depths of feeling in the peoples' hearts. Life and nature went back into art once more; no wonder their re-apparition was saluted with so much delight.
Two other Madonnas painted by him, one at Florence in the Academy, the other in Paris in the Louvre, besides his great Mosaic in the apse of the Cathedral at Pisa, serve to show with what prudence Cimabue introduced naturalistic qualities into art, while always respecting the tradition of the older art and preserving the solemn graces and the majestic style of monumental painting. The old frescoes of the upper church at Assisi which represent episodes in the life of St. Francis have also been attributed to Cimabue, but evidently were done by a number of artists probably under his direction. It is easy to { 142} see from them what an important role the Florentine artist played in directing the gropings of his assistant artists.
After Cimabue the most important name at Florentine in the Thirteenth Century is that of his friend, Gaddo Gaddi, whose years of life correspond almost exactly with those of his great contemporary. His famous Coronation of the Virgin at Santa Maria de Fiore in Florence shows that he was greatly influenced by the new ideas that had come into art. Greater than either of these well-known predecessors however, was Giotto the friend of Dante, whose work is still considered worthy of study by artists because of certain qualities in which it never has been surpassed nor quite outgrown. From Giotto, however, we shall turn aside for a moment to say something of the development of art in other cities of Italy, for it must not be thought that Florence was the only one to take up the new art methods which developed so marvelously during the Thirteenth Century.