Amazon.com description: Product Description: Despite his fame as the founder of the early Florentine Renaissance, Giovanni Cimabue, 1240-1302, has been considered almost exclusively from a formal and attributive point of view with only general references to his Franciscan environment. But Professor Battisti, editor of Marcatre and Professor at the University of Rome, is a specialist in cultural reconstruction; he has carefully studied the opinions of the artist's contemporaries and near contemporaries and has placed him within the fascinating complex of ideas of the thirteenth century. In addition to his significant critical judgments, the author has accomplished a great deal of documentary and stylistic research. Using a special technique involving numerous photographs taken over a period of months, one of the major recent innovations in art history, he has pieced together more than two-thirds of the lower scenes in the choir of the Lower Church of the Assisi Basilica, scenes which have been completely obliterated by the inversion of the white lead and the disintegration of the painted surfaces. The present volume will force a revision of the current ideas about Cimabue and will alter many of the judgments on the artist and his era.