Cimabue, the nickname (Ox-head) given to Cenni di Peppi, was the major artist working in Florence at the end of the 13th-century. Associated with Gothic art, he was an important contributor to Pre-Renaissance Painting (c.1300–1400). A contemporary of Dante (who describes him in The Divine Comedy, as the leading painter of the time), he is supposed to have taught Giotto (1267–1337) and initiated the move from the static “unreal” style of Byzantine art to the more realistic trecento idiom of Florentine Proto-Renaissance art, using three-dimensional space, more natural-looking human forms and greater emotion.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), the Italian, writer, painter and architect — writing 300 years later — places an account of Cimabue at the very beginning of his “Lives of the Artists” (1550), stating that he gave “the first light to the art of painting”. But little if any solid evidence remains to support this assertion.

From October of 1916 through January of 1917, Rudolf Steiner gave a series of nine lectures known as the Art Course. These lectures were given the title of: The History of Art. Click here to discover what Steiner said about Cimabue in the first lecture, or in the entire lecture series.