At the Louvre, revelations on Cimabue, master overshadowed by his pupil Giotto

At the very end of Two-hundred, The San Francesco de Pisse church had a decor which was to produce a effect as striking as it is fascinating. Overlooking the large nave with completely stripped architecture, roughly in its middle, in support of one of the beams of the rostrum of the roodle, separating the space devolved to the faithful of the choir reserved for the Franciscan brothers, Three large wooden paintings were suspended by chains stuck in the vault and lit by lamps, also suspended.

Left, The big one Majestyor the Virgin and child in majesty surrounded by six angelsof Cimabue (today at the Louvre), painted in the 1280s. On the right, Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata (work also kept at the Louvre), commanded in 1298 in Giotto. In the center, a crucifixion of which the author is not known. Monumental (and very expensive, the Majesty being covered with Lapis-Lazuli, the most expensive pigment of the time), these Devotion imagesstaged in a very simple way, were intended to immediately capture the attention and to support the preaching set out in the gallery.

Their positioning, very high, also explains certain pictorial biases, in particular some deliberate deformations. “Cimabue had thought about the visibility of his work by painting the characters of the top slightly larger than those of the bottom,” confirms Thomas Bohl, conservative to the conservative Louvre painting department and commissioner of this very first exhibition that the museum devotes to Cimabue.

Spectacular works

The time was that of The golden age of the Franciscan communityattracting ever more faithful in his churches by his simple speeches in vernacular language, in the spirit of François d’Assise, bourgeois having renounced all his goods for a simple and pious life, died in 1226 and canonized in 1228. Singling somewhat from the ideal of destitution of the saint, his successors then built The most beautiful churches in Italyincluding that of Assisi on the very places of the burial of François, a real total art project where works a plethora of artists from different European countries. The workshops of Cimabue then Giotto delivered a spectacular set of frescoes narrating the life of François, alas altered by time and by the devastating earthquake of September 1997.