Cimabue

Giovanni Cimabue worked in Florence around 1240 to 1302, painting and designing mosaics under the long shadow of Byzantine convention. He drew heavily from those eastern models but began to bend them: his figures carried more lifelike proportion, his shading suggested actual volume instead of symbol. Giorgio Vasari later named him the teacher of Giotto, the man who lit the Proto-Renaissance, though earlier sources have made scholars wary of taking that lineage as fact. What remains is the pivot itself—a painter who leaned into the stiffness of his inheritance and found give.