At that time there was plenty of painting in Italy, but it was Greek, the work of artists at Constantinople (Byzantium), the centre of Christianity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the fount of ecclesiastical energy, and it was crude workmanship, existing purely as an accessory of worship.

Cimabue, of whom, I may say, almost nothing definite is known, and upon whom the delightful but casual old Vasari is the earliest authority, as Dante was his first eulogist, carried on the Byzantine tradition, but breathed a little life into it.

In his picture here we see him feeling his way from the unemotional painted symbols of the Faith to humanity itself.

One can understand this large panel being carried (as we know the similar one at S.Maria Novella was) in procession and worshipped, but it is nearer to the icon of the Russian peasant of today than to a Raphael.

The Madonna is above life; the Child is a little man.