the picture and its gables, which are delicately traced with an ornament and interrupted at intervals by thirty medallions on gold backgrounds, each of which contains the half-figure of a saint. The face of the Madonna is marked by a tender and melancholy expression, the infant is well-shaped and not wanting in animation; the group displays a rare amount of maternal affection. The attitudes of the angels, the movement of the heads, and the elegance with which the hair is wound around the cinctures, falling in locks on the neck, are all pleasing to the eye. The energetic mien of some prophets is striking. There is a certain loss of balance, caused by the weight of the Virgin’s head as compared with the slightness of her frame. The features are designed in a way typical to the thirteenth century, softened, as regards the expression of the eye, by closed lids and an exaggeration of elliptical form in the iris. The nose starts from a bony protuberance, and is depressed at the end; the mouth and chin are, as usual, small and prim. In Christ, the same coarse nose is united to a half-open mouth and large, staring eyes, with features which may be considered too masculine and square. The hands of both Virgin and Child are remarkable for the length of the tapered fingers, their wide separation near the palm and the stiffness of their articulations; the feet are quite conventional in shape. In the grouping of the angels, the absence of all true notions of composition is striking. Their frames are slight for the heads, though their movements are more natural and pleasing than those of earlier artists. In the setting of drapery, Cimabue shows no sensible progress, but he softens the hardness of the fine engraved outlines, and he gives the flesh-tints a clear and carefully fused colour, imparting the surfaces with some of the rotundity which they had lost. With him vanish the old contrasts of half tones and shades. He abandons line shadowing for a careful stippling which follows and develops form. He relieves the general verde underlayer with ruddy shadows and warm lights. A flush tinges without staining the cheeks and lips. Unity and harmony are provided by a system of final glazes, which, having now in part disappeared, exaggerate the paleness of the flesh. The draperies are painted in lively and transparent colours; reds, gently harmonising with the flesh, along with brilliant blues and rosy pinks. In ornamentation, there is more taste and a better subordination than older works.
Cimabue, Saint Francis.
Museo della Porziuncola, Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi.
From the date of this altarpiece, the Florentine school began to expand. Without it the superiority of Cimabue over his predecessors would remain unexplained, the principal link of artistic history in Florence would be lost and Giotto’s greatness would be difficult to understand. There are companion pictures to that of Santa Maria Novella – one at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, another in the Louvre. For various reasons neither of them gives a totally unequivocal idea of the master.
