Starting Wednesday, the Louvre Museum in Paris presents an unprecedented exhibition dedicated to the Italian Cimabue (around 1240-1302), who revolutionized Western painting and opened the way to naturalism, but whose biography remains incomplete.
Entitled “Revisiting Cimabue. At the origins of Italian painting”, it includes some forty works, including paintings, some of which recovered their original frame for this occasion, and rare illuminated manuscripts.
Through a thematic itinerary, the exhibition highlights the novelty of his way of painting between 1280 and 1290: trying to suggest a three-dimensional space, the realism of the bodies and objects of his time, non-existent until then, radically breaks with the conventions of representation inherited from oriental art, particularly from Byzantine icons.
Cimabue’s paintings are compared with some of his predecessors and successors, among whom are Giotto and Duccio di Buoninsegna, for whom he was a teacher and who were inspired by his narrative genius.
Many of them have been loaned by Italy.
– Rediscovery –
Two paintings, whose restoration was completed at the end of 2024, constitute the focus of the exhibition.
The first, the “Maestà”, a monumental Virgin and Child that arrived in France after the Napoleonic invasion and was finally ceded by Italy.
The work has often been described as “the birth certificate of Western painting” due to the humanization of the sacred figures and the painter’s illusionistic search, particularly in the representation of space with the throne seen from the side.
Its restoration gave “the opportunity to discover unprecedented details that were no longer perceived at all, among which the subtlety of the colors, including the luminous glow of the blues all painted in lapis lazuli, and fragments of Arabic writing” explains Thomas Bohl, conservator of the paintings department and curator of the exhibition.
Cimabue was one of the first European artists to become interested in Arabic calligraphy.
The second key painting is the “Mocked Christ”, a small image that tells a passage from the life of Jesus, when he suffers mockery before his flagellation, acquired in 2023.
It was rediscovered in France in a private house in 2019 and classified as a National Treasure.
It is part of a diptych of which the Louvre brings together for the first time the only three panels known to date. The other two were on loan from the National Gallery in London and the Frick Collection in New York.
“Cimabue anchors the composition in the daily life of his time, daring to dress the characters in clothes from their time. He thus echoes the concerns of the Franciscans, promoters of a more internalized and immediate spirituality,” says the curator.
-Dante-
Cenni di Pepo alias Cimabue has long remained a mysterious painter who has fascinated poets, artists, collectors and art historians for seven centuries.
Very little is known about his life, as the exhibition’s prologue recalls.
Even the meaning of his nickname is unknown and only some archival documents allow the artist to be identified and provide few reference points in his career.
“It is Dante, in a passage from ‘The Divine Comedy’, who forges the myth at the beginning of the 14th century: by establishing its importance, he is at the origin of the fascination that the name of Cimabue will exert from the Medici until today,” he emphasizes. Bohl.
“Florence, Assisi, Pisa: we know, however, that he worked in the largest churches in Italy and that he achieved extraordinary fame,” he adds.
The exhibition concludes with the presentation of the great “Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata” by Giotto.
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