Cimabue (?1240-?1302) was a Florentine painter and mosaicist. His work on the mosaic of St. John the Evangelist in the apse of Pisa Cathedral is documented, and there is general agreement on stylistic grounds about the attribution of the Santa Trinita Madonna, now in the Uffizi, and the frescoes which were in the church of San Francesco at Assisi until the time of the most recent earthquake. However for Vasari, and for Ruskin, Cimabue was also the painter of the Rucellai Madonna, formerly in the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and now in the Uffizi Gallery, and the Saint Francis altarpiece in Santa Croce in Florence. The Rucellai Madonna is now accepted as the work of Duccio (active 1278 - 1318?), and the Saint Francis altarpiece is attributed to an earlier anonymous master.
Vasari claims that Cimabue shed the 'first light on the art of painting' after the disasters which had destroyed the art and architecture of Italy, and so began the process which eventually led to the perfection of Michelangelo (see Vasari, Le Vite, Testo II.35 and Vasari on Cimabue). Ruskin appears here to accept Vasari's account of progress in Florentine art at least at the level of technique. However he later develops, notably in his 1873 Oxford Lecture on Cimabue, the idea that there are other and more important criteria for judging Cimabue's achievement. Ruskin asserts there, in a deliberate challenge to orthodox views, that Cimabue is not only the first, but also the greatest, of the Florentine painters (see Works, 23.197, and Ruskin on Cimabue).