Cimabue art in a kitchen Vs in Le Louvre

A prized C13th painting found hanging over a stove in the kitchen of an elderly woman in Compiègne, north of Paris in 2019. The painting was go­ing to the rubbish tip during her house clear­ance; suddenly her fam­ily called in an expert to see if there was anything of value in the pro­perty, just before the house was sold. Think­ing the work could be worth money, the local expert sent it to a Paris art specialist who de­cl­ared it to be a genuine Cimabue. The art world was VERY surprised.

Christ Mocked c1280

by Cimabue

artfixdaily

                                                       

Its sale made the Fren­ch woman a millionaire, but when she died two days after the auction, her estate was split between her heirs. It said that Culture Minister Franck Riester had followed the recom­mendation of France's Commission for National Treasures, blocking the painting's export abroad to allow funds to be raised. This would enable the work to be exhibited in the Louvre in Paris beside the Maestà de Santa Trinita, another Cimabue mast­er­piece in the Louvre being restored.  

Cimabue was born in Florence, among the first Italian masters to move away from the formal Byzantine style of art to a more realistic treatment of sitters. Largely known as a fresco pain­t­er in Fl­orence and Rome, he signalled the start of the Florentine Renaiss­ance and was probably the master of Giotto, the great C14th Florentine artist. Only about a dozen works attributed to Cim­abue, who did not sign his paintings, are known to exist. But I cannot remember much about Cimabue from lectures.

It's easy to see why Christ Mocked was mistaken for a rel­ig­ious icon as his work was produced on poplar wood panels with back­grounds of gold-leaf paint. The tiny image (25 x 20cm) dep­ict­ed Jesus being mocked before his cruc­ifixion, one of 8 panels that survived from his work called the Diptych of Devotion c1280. Of these 8 panels, 5 are still missing. Only two other panels in the series were found: Flagel­l­ation of Christ in NY’s Frick Collection and The Virgin and Child with Two Angels in London’s National Gallery. That Christ Mocked was one of the missing piec­es from that altarpiece was soon authenticated with certain­ty; it had exactly the right dimensions, style and col­ours, and the wood panel came from the same plank of poplar as the rest of the altarpiece.

Cimabue's exceptionally rare gold-ground panel painting made headlines. Offered by an auction house north of Paris in Oct that year, the treasure sparked a bidding war, soaring past its estimate to sell for €24.2 million with fees!!  The Louvre museum lost the bidding war!  Although the foreign buyer was not named, French reports say the work was bought by two Chilean collectors specialising in Ital­ian Renaissance art. 

So the Louvre had to keep the work in France to raise more money. France’s Culture Ministry declared Christ Mocked to be a National Treas­ure and implemented a tem­porary export ban in Dec 2019 that barred it from leaving the country for 30 months. Luckily the export ban bought enough time for the Louvre to raise funds needed to match the win­­n­ing bid and to acquire the work. Neither the Culture Ministry nor the Louvre announced how much it paid for Christ Mocked or how the money was raised to buy it; only that it involved a MAJOR project to encourage donations from patrons offered tax exemptions. Happily the Société des Amis du Louvre  contributed the final million euros that made this acquisition possible, along with income from outside France. Hard to guess that the painting had been hanging above a hot stove in a Paris house a short time earlier!

Thus the Louvre has taken over the pre-Renaissance painting, now one of the old­est works in its col­l­ect­ion, after a longgg effort to keep it in France. The Louvre already had a much larger Cimabue painting on display, Maestà (c1280). This huge work, 4.3 ms x 2.7 ms, completed its restoration, and now they have put both Cim­abues on public display in its 2025 exhibition (see below).  

Majesty of Santa Maria dei Servi

Cimabue, c1280

Wiki

Louvre’s Director Laurence des Cars said the work constituted a crucial milest­one in the history of art, marking the fascin­ating transition from icon to painting. He repeated that it would soon hang near the Maestà, a lar­g­er tempera work by Cimabue that also dates from that decade. This piece has been in the mus­eum’s collection since 1813, originally looted from Italy in the Napoleonic era.

The French culture ministry reported that Christ Mocked was in good condition, showing how Cimabue used a new language of expression, especially "visible in the humanistic treatment of the face of Jesus, the rendition of people's expressions or space". Appropriately Christ Mocked is the centrepiece of the Louvre’s Review Cimabue Exhibition which continues until May 2025. See the painting next to  St Francis Receiving the Stigmata by  Giotto. Bringing together 40 works, this fine exhibition highlights the “rupture” represented by Cimabue's Art.

St Francis receiving the stigmata from Jesus,

note the tempura and gold panel 

by Giotto,  c1295, Wiki