Cimabue, born in 1240, whose works adorn the Basilica of St. Francis, is credited by Vasari with being the artist who initiated the great restoration of the art of painting in Italy. At school he would cover his books with drawings instead of reading them: his parents congratulated him on his originality. When a group of Greek craftsmen was brought to Florence to decorate the Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Cimabue truanted school altogether and spent whole days watching them work. His father approached these craftsmen and elicited their agreement to take Cimabue on as an apprentice, for according to Vasari he had a great respect for his son and believed that his inclinations ought to be trusted. How different from poor St. Francis, who only had to show an inclination for his father to move to crush it! And how different the pursuit of truth that followed, the one so punitive and painful and the other so vigorous and beautiful. Cimabue quickly became famous, so famous that when he painted a large new Madonna for Santa Maria Novella the painting was processed through the streets to the sound of trumpets and a cheering crowd. One day, he was walking in the countryside when he came across a young shepherd boy sitting in a field, drawing one of his own sheep with a pointed stone on a smooth piece of rock. This was Giotto. Cimabue was so astonished by his talent that he asked the boy to come and live with him, and the boy replied that if his father agreed, then he would. The father was delighted, and Giotto went back with Cimabue to Florence, where, as Vasari admits, he rapidly diminished Cimabue’s glory by becoming one of the greatest painters the world has ever known. Dante summed up the situation in the Divine Comedy:
Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field
In painting; Giotto’s all the rage today;
The other’s fame lies in the dust concealed.
It was in the Basilica di San Francesco that these first artists of the Renaissance evolved their artistic vision, for the edifice quickly grew so large that a certain blankness adhered to it, and adheres to it still. It is easy to enlarge the scale of a human construction: what is hard is to amplify its brain. The basilica was a dinosaur that needed to be rendered articulate. That was what the artists were for, to fill in its blankness, to program it with meaning and significance. The modest spirit of St. Francis alone could not fill its barn-like spaces: it required the seasoning of art to flavor the bland atmosphere of pilgrimage.
Yet the modern-day pilgrims like their blandness, their plain fare. The basilica is full of them, passing the painted walls with barely a glance. The specifics of art are too strong for their palates. It is bones they have come for in their air-conditioned coaches; bones, and the experience of their own coming, their massing: the basic unit of life, entire unto itself, moving and massing together like polyps on the ocean bed. Held as they are in the unblinking stare of existence, interpretation and art do not concern them. The painted walls of the basilica are no more to them than the texture of the rock on which their colony has massed itself. Those walls are now faded and damaged with time: they have their own fame, their own divinity, but the pilgrims dislike people looking at paintings. They hiss and shush and send over angry stares. Now and then a message is broadcast over the sound system, reminding those who are not in the basilica to attend Mass that absolute silence is required or they will be asked to leave. Then the voice of the priest singing the liturgy issues from the crackling speakers once more, a sound that is both automatic and animal, like the loud call of some primitive creature whose interminable cadences now and again invite the unanimous caterwauling of his neighbors.
In the upper basilica there are a large number of frescoes depicting the life of St. Francis. Until recently it was believed that Giotto had painted them, but my researches in the proprietario’s library have informed me that it is now known that he did not. Nevertheless, his name remains there, in an engraved perspex rectangle on the basilica wall. Elsewhere in the basilica there are works by Cimabue, Simone Martini, Lorenzetti, and the real Giotto, and none of them are labeled at all. They are difficult to find: they lie in sepulchral darkness among the vaults of the lower church, like prisoners in a dungeon. The customary modern appurtenances of the art lover are nowhere to be found. There are no lights, no silken tasseled ropes, no information. One is obstructed and put off the scent at every opportunity. The broadcast warnings intensify: the shushing and the hostile stares come thick and fast through the gloom, for it is in the lower church that the bones lie, and the closer we get to them the more vigorously art is derided.
I begin to feel a little outraged. It is they who seem heretical to me, these spiritual bureaucrats with their rules and regulations, their monotonous chanting, their punitive demeanor and their threats of expulsion. It is they who are insolent: so quick to damn and shame, and glorying so in the execution of it. As a child I was accustomed to the way adults seized on Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious: when they unsheathed it I would glimpse the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity, a place that seemed like a crack in the safe surface of the world; and it did appear to me that judgment lay down there, flowing like a black river within the tributaries of personalities, from a nameless common source. But now I found the Christian story all human, like literature: it was a long time since it had been raised as a weapon over my head. It is perhaps for exactly this reason that the pilgrims object to the Giotto-lovers. The whole place, I now see, has set itself against art as against a rival religion. A group of teenagers with clipboards murmur in front of Lorenzetti’s Madonna dei Tramonti and are instantly shot down with a volley of glares like a firing squad’s fusillade. A child asks a question of its parent concerning Giotto’s Flight into Egypt and is bludgeoned from all sides with disapproval. They are enraged, these people queuing to worship at the strange, sealed hexagonal tomb. Like Jesus, Francis was a misfit who has become an orthodoxy. But the Pharisee, it seems, was well drawn as an eternal human type. Of what, precisely, are we meant to feel ashamed? Is their faith so fragile, so impacted, that the whole world must be silent while it is teased out? They seem to disapprove so instinctively, as a hand gropes in the darkness for a switch. A little light comes on in their eyes: it reveals something, a sacred space in the brain that perhaps otherwise they would have had trouble finding their way to, with a bone lying in it on a little heap of dust.
St. Francis (fresco), by Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo) (c. 1240–c. 1301)
In the right wing of the transept there is a famous painting of St. Francis by Cimabue. He is small, hunched, unsmiling. He wears a monk’s tonsure and brown cassock and clutches a Bible in his hands. His eyes are large, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded, of a light brown color: their expression is unutterably sad. It is not the sadness that shows in the rolling whites of a saint’s upturned, imploring gaze. It is a sadness that you see in the eyes of people who were unhappy children. His soft, full mouth trembles like a ripple in the surface of water. It is curious to see the paths of St. Francis and Cimabue cross in this shadowy corner of the basilica. Cimabue painted a large number of frescoes in the upper and lower church alike, virtually none of which survive. He was reputed to be arrogant and perfectionistic, rejecting work that bore the slightest flaw in conception or technique. This was a new personality in the thirteenth-century world, this temperamental individualist. In those days a painter was a craftsman: the artist did not yet exist. The craftsman did not throw away work because it was less than perfect. He was the master of his materials, but he was not yet their author.