New Light on Cimabue’s Lead White at Assisi

SINCE THE AGE OF DANTE, Cenni di Pepo (ca. 1240–1302), better known as Cimabue, has been considered a forefather of Italian Renaissance painting. He is the first painter chronicled in Giorgio Vasari’s Vitae, there portrayed as a hero who set Florentine painters on a path to surpass the achievements of the revered classical past. Among the works praised in Vasari’s biography are the murals Cimabue painted in the upper church apse and transepts of the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi, likely executed between 1277–80. Depicting the Apocalypse, the Life, Death, and Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Four Evangelists, and the Apostles, Cimabue’s murals are, unfortunately, in poor condition (fig. 1). They had already deteriorated by the time Vasari saw them in 1563; in his 1568 edition of the Vitae he described them as “consumed by time and dust.” Cimabue’s working