The Florentine master in whom Steiner saw the old visionary painting reach its last height, just before Giotto turned art toward the earth.
Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo, c. 1240 to 1302) was the Florentine painter who, in Rudolf Steiner's reading of art history, brought the Byzantine sacred image to its final Western flowering. He worked about the time of Dante's birth. Steiner saw his vast frescoed Madonnas and saints as beings that gaze into the earthly world from spheres beyond it, painted while a visionary life still stood behind the artist's hand.
In Steiner's Own Words
Such are his pictures of the Madonna. Such, gazing down into this earthly world, are his representations of the Saviour and of saints and angels and the like. We must realise that all these paintings are born of an imagination, in the background of which was still a life of spiritual vision. Such vision knew full well that the impulses of Christianity had come to Earth from another world, and that this unearthly world could not be represented in mere naturalistic forms.
What it Means Today
Stand in front of the Santa Trinita Madonna, now in the Uffizi in Florence, and you meet exactly what Steiner described. The enthroned Virgin is enormous, frontal, weightless, lifted on a ground that still keeps the gold of the icon. The faces follow Byzantine pattern, yet a warmth has entered the modelling that older mosaic work did not carry. This is the dawn of Western painting caught at one figure: the eastern gold ground beginning to warm into soul. Cimabue is the hinge, the last painter to compose from the visionary center and the teacher whose pupil would step off it.
Art historians have long sensed the same threshold without Steiner's vocabulary. Giorgio Vasari, in his 1550 Lives of the Artists, opened his whole account of the rebirth of painting with Cimabue, naming him the first to loosen the stiff Greek manner. Twentieth-century scholarship narrowed the legend, reassigning the Rucellai Madonna to Duccio and questioning how much of the Assisi cycle is his hand, yet it kept his place as the figure where the icon turns Italian. Steiner's contribution is to read that turn inwardly. Where Vasari saw growing skill, Steiner saw an epoch closing: the spiritual world, once seen and then painted, withdrawing from direct vision so that the human soul could learn to find spirit again within earthly nature. The Thalira reading holds the two together. Cimabue is the last clear evening light of the old seeing, and his gold is the colour of a door swinging shut.
Where to Read More