This is where Italian art begins.
The Uffizi arranges its collection roughly chronologically, and Room 2 is its opening argument: three enormous altarpieces, all depicting the Madonna enthroned, by three different masters — Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto — painted within a generation of each other, lined up so you can watch the revolution happen in real time.
Cimabue's Madonna is the oldest and the most Byzantine: gold ground, flat, the heavenly realm beyond ordinary space.
The angels stack in rigid rows.
Mary's face is sorrowful and remote.
It is magnificent, but it is art from another world — a world in which painting's purpose was not to depict reality but to gesture toward the divine.
Fun fact: Cimabue's real name was Cenni di Pepo.
'Cimabue' was a nickname meaning 'bull's head' — apparently a reference to his stubbornness.
Dante placed him in Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, noting that his fame had already been eclipsed by his own pupil.
That pupil was Giotto, who is also in this room.
