First View Of Cimabue’s Crucifix Reconstructed I didn’t just look up at the blackened crucifix: it looked back, pressed down, like an immense wing, dark and charred; impinged, with all the weight it had borne. The inertial pull of the burden itself is invisible, though we could swear at times that the cross was actually on our backs, as in the innumerable images rendered by the anonymous and the known. And the artist was the first to sign his work. It goes like this: anonymous, then Cimabue, then— Published in the Times Literary Supplement