The Work
Cimabue's Santa Trinita Maestà (c. 1280-1290), now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, is the largest and most theologically complex of the three great late-13th-century Florentine Maestà altarpieces (the others are Duccio's Rucellai Madonna and Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna). At approximately 385 × 223 cm, it dominated the high altar of the Florentine church of Santa Trinita and represented the culmination of the Italian Byzantine tradition at the moment of its transformation. Vasari describes the sensation it caused in Florence and credits its public procession through the streets as a civic event.
Biblical Source
Psalm 45:9 - "the queen stands at your right hand in gold of Ophir" - and Revelation 12:1 - "a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head" - provide the primary scriptural sources for the enthroned Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The Madonna in the Maestà tradition is simultaneously the historical mother of Jesus and the cosmic figure of these eschatological texts: the woman clothed with the sun, enthroned in heavenly glory, held in honor by the angels who surround her throne.
Isaiah 7:14 - "the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel" - and Luke 1:28 - "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you" - complete the typological program: the enthroned Queen is the Virgin of the Annunciation, whose reception of divine grace is the historical foundation of her heavenly exaltation.
Artist
See "cimabue-crucifix-arezzo" for biographical details. The Santa Trinita Maestà and the Arezzo crucifix are the two works that most clearly demonstrate Cimabue's historical position as the pivotal figure between Byzantine tradition and the Italian Renaissance: more spatially experimental than his Byzantine predecessors, more hierarchically formal than his successor Giotto.
Iconography
The Santa Trinita Maestà shows Cimabue's spatial experiments: the angels at the throne's sides appear to be standing behind and beneath the throne structure rather than floating in the gold ground of pure Byzantine abstraction, an early attempt at spatial recession. The prophets below the throne - Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and David - hold scrolls with prophetic texts that connect the Madonna's enthronement to the biblical predictions she fulfills. The compositional vocabulary Cimabue established here became the template for Duccio, Giotto, and all subsequent Italian panel painting.