Crucifix

Christ's body sags in a long, sorrowing curve, hips swung aside, eyes closed in death, with the mourning Virgin and Saint John set in the arms of the cross - Cimabue's vision of the crucified Christ as suffering man rather than triumphant king. Painted for the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce in Florence, the great panel was nearly destroyed when the river Arno flooded the city in 1966, stripping away much of its paint and making the cross a famous emblem of the disaster and the long labor of its rescue. A generation later Giotto, in his own crucifix for Santa Maria Novella, would push this new naturalism further still.