For Vasari the renaissance of Italian painting after the disasters following the classical period was a process beginning with Cimabue, who soon went beyond the work of his original teachers of the Byzantine schools, and moving towards the perfection achieved by Michelangelo. This story was taken for granted by Reynolds, Discourse One, 1769, for whom even Raphael only achieved his full greatness after he had learned from Michelangelo to represent the 'general and invariable ideas of nature' ( Reynolds, Discourses, p.16).
Eastlake, editor of Murray's Handbook of Painting in Italy, expressed surprise in a footnote to page 38 that Kugler, the author, should have spent so much time on Duccio's Maesta. Kugler's praise seemed him to 'border on extravagance', but was to be excused on the grounds that Duccio's 'influence on the progress of art in the fourteenth century' may justify the 'exaggeration in vindicating [his] fame'
On that basis when early Italian paintings - including works attributed to Cimabue, Duccio (whose Rucellai Madonna was attributed by Ruskin to Cimabue), and Orcagna - were bought by the National Gallery in 1857, Eastlake, as Director, justified the policy in his 1857/8 Report on the grounds that;
The unsightly specimens of Margaritone and the earliest Tuscan painters were selected solely for their historical importance, and as showing the rude beginnings from which, through nearly two centuries and a half, Italian art slowly advanced to the period of Raphael and his contemporaries.
Some of Ruskin's references in Modern Painters I to the Byzantine schools and to Cimabue and Giotto seem to accept this view of progress. Ruskin later came to challenge such ideas, most directly with the assertion at Works, 24.40 that Cimabue is both the first and the greatest of the Tuscan painters.