The Louvre Museum in Paris presents from Wednesday a new exhibition devoted to the Italian Cimabue (around 1240-1302) who revolutionized Western painting at the end of the 13th century, opening the way to naturalism, but whose biography remains lacunar.
Entitled “Review Cimabue. At the origins of Italian painting”, it includes around forty works, including some of those by this visionary painter that have come down to us and which can be moved, as well as rare illuminated manuscripts.
Through a thematic journey, it highlights the novelty of his way of painting between 1280 and 1290: seeking to suggest a three-dimensional space, the realism of bodies and objects of his time, non-existent until then, he radically breaks with the representational conventions inherited from oriental art, particularly Byzantine icons.
Cimabue’s paintings are compared with some of his predecessors and successors, including Giotto and Duccio di Buoninsegna, for whom he was a master and who were inspired by his narrative verve. Many of them were on loan from Italy.
– Rediscovery –
Two paintings, whose restoration was completed at the end of 2024, constitute the pivot of the exhibition.
The first, a monumental virgin and child brought back from the Napoleonic campaigns and ceded to France by Italy, is called the “Maestà”. The work has often been called “the birth certificate of Western painting” because of the humanization of the holy figures and the illusionist quest of the painter, particularly in the rendering of space with the throne seen sideways. .
Its restoration was “an opportunity to discover new details that we no longer perceived at all, including the subtlety of the colors, including the luminous brilliance of the blues all painted in lapis lazuli, and fragments of Arabic writing , in which he was one of the first to take an interest”, explains Thomas Bohl, curator in the paintings department and curator of the exhibition.
The second, “The Derision of Christ”, a small painting retracing a passage in the life of Jesus where he is mocked before his flagellation, was acquired in 2023.
-It was rediscovered in France in private homes 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 clothing of his time. He thus echoes the concerns of the Franciscans, promoters of a more interiorized and immediate spirituality,” specifies 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. Knowledge about his biography is very slim, as the exhibition prologue reminds us.
We don’t even know the meaning of his nickname and only a few archive documents make it possible to identify the artist and provide rare references in his career.
“It was Dante, in a passage from +the Divine Comedy+, who forged the myth at the beginning of the 14th century: by establishing its importance, he was at the origin of the fascination that the name of Cimabue would exercise from the Medici until today,” emphasizes Mr. Bohl.
“Florence, Assisi, Pisa, we know that he worked in the largest churches in Italy and enjoyed 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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