The biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote about Cimabue's life, 250 years after his death. He wrote that one day Cimabue was walking in the country when he saw a little shepherd boy scratching a picture of a sheep onto a rock. The drawing was so good that Cimabue went to the boy's father and begged that he might take the boy as his apprentice and teach him to paint. The boy was Giotto, who became a very famous painter, and who is thought of as the very first painter of the Italian Renaissance.