Nowhere does the local patriotism of Florentine writers more powerfully manifest itself than in their accounts of early Tuscan artists. Since the latter half of the fifteenth century there has been a succession of writers who have sought to prove that the whole credit of the revival of the art of painting in Italy belonged to Florence. “It became an axiom with Tuscan historians that every great artist” in Siena or “in northern Italy about whose artistic education they knew little or nothing must have been initiated into the art of painting in Florence,” and that every important early picture or fresco that could not be proved to be by an artist of another school was by a Florentine master.
They were not content with hymning the mighty genius of Giotto, for Giotto had contemporaries of other schools, who, though lesser artists, were also innovators. They were anxious to show that, in the 13th century, when all was darkness elsewhere, the new light was already shining in the city by the Arno.
Consequently, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, it became the fashion to magnify Cimabue, to antedate his career and attribute all early Tuscan pictures of merit to him. Cimabue was admirably held as the ‘Father of modern painting’. The evidence of contemporary documents and early references to Cimabue do not at all justify the prejudiced statements of patriotic Florentines. The evidence of documents only proves that he helped to execute the much-restored Majestas of the Pisa Duomo and that he painted a picture of St. Chiara at Pisa, a work which has since been lost.
Dante indeed tells us that Cimabue held the field in painting before Giotto; but Dante, exiled though he was, was deeply imbued with Florentinism, and was prone to exaggerate the achievements of his friends and of his friends’ friends. If Dante did not know Cimabue personally, as an early tradition relates, he was a friend of Giotto, and both his Florentinism and his friendship with Cimabue’s pupil, Giotto, led him no doubt to magnify the importance of the older master’s achievement. Dante, like a true Florentine, had a strong prejudice against the Sienese and all of their works. He probably knew little or nothing of the achievement of the few great masters of the Roman proto-Renaissance. Dante’s mention of Cimabue proves nothing more than that the artist was the greatest Florentine painter in the years that immediately preceded Giotto’s recognition as a great painter, that is, in the concluding years of the thirteenth century.
The early commentators on Dante add but a little personal anecdote as comment upon the poet’s brief allusion to the master. Ghiberti, writing a century after Cimabue’s death, merely makes a passing mention of him as one of the painters in the Greek manner. It was not until the beginning of the 15th century that the Cimabue legend began to assume definite shape. At the time of the Renaissance, Florentines began to take a deeper interest in the achievements of great Florentines, writing “Lives” of them in imitation of the classical biographers. And as the golden age of Italian art began to wane, the voice of the art critic and the art historian began to appeal to a larger public audience. Florence was eager to show that her sons had led the way in the revival of the art of painting. She soon gained the ear of the civilised world, and persuaded people to take the achievement of the early Florentine painters at her own valuation.