Art by Cimabue

Cimabue worked in Florence in the late 1200s, right at the hinge point between the flat, formal Byzantine painting style that had dominated Italian art for centuries and the more naturalistic approach his likely student, Giotto, would push much further. Legend credits him with discovering Giotto as a shepherd boy sketching on rocks, a story most historians treat as later myth rather than fact. In 2019, a small devotional panel, Christ Mocked, was found hanging in the kitchen of an elderly woman's house in a French village, misidentified for years as a minor Russian icon; once authenticated as an actual Cimabue, it sold at auction for €24 million.