The Crucifix by Cimabue at Santa Croce is a wooden crucifix, painted in distemper, attributed to the Florentine painter and mosaicist. It is one of the first Italian artworks to break from the late medieval Byzantine style and is renowned for its technical innovations and humanistic iconography. The work presents a lifelike and physically imposing depiction of the passion at Calvary.
About Crucifix (Cimabue, Santa Croce) in brief
The Crucifix by Cimabue at Santa Croce is a wooden crucifix, painted in distemper, attributed to the Florentine painter and mosaicist. It is one of the first Italian artworks to break from the late medieval Byzantine style and is renowned for its technical innovations and humanistic iconography. The work presents a lifelike and physically imposing depiction of the passion at Calvary. A graphic portrayal of human suffering, the painting is of seminal importance in art history and has influenced painters from Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez to Francis Bacon. Both of the surviving crucifixes were commissioned by the Franciscan order. Founded by Saint Francis of Assisi, their reformist, religious and social views had a profound effect on the visual arts in the century after his death. From 1240, painters favoured the Christus patiens style: a saviour who shared the burden of pain and shared the pain of humanity– especially for the contemporary Franciscan– taste for verisimilitude, as it bore little relation to the actual suffering likely endured during a crucifixion, and overly distanced the divine from the human aspect of the story.
The work has been in the Basilica di SantaCroce in Florence since the late thirteenth century, and at the Museo dell’OperaSanta Croce since restoration following flooding of the Arno in 1966. It remains in poor condition despite conservation efforts, and is in a state of disrepair and needs to be restored to its original condition. It has been described as ‘one of the best known examples of the earliest and best-known examples of Christus Patiens– the earliest known examples of the pain and suffering of Christ’s crucifixion in the world. It seems influenced by a thirsteenth-century Franciscans Meditation on Christ that emphasised pathos and human interest in the suffering of the Passion, and his skin is unblemished, perhaps evoking an eternal or timeless sky, not present in the main crucified figure. The choice of a white, veil-like loincloth may be influenced by earlier crucifixions by Giunta Pisano.
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