By Ilaria Friday
From January 22, 2025, the Louvre Museum is devoting an exhibition to Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century. It is the result of two “Cimabuesque” news stories of great importance for the museum: the restoration of the Maestà and the acquisition of a previously unpublished panel by Cimabue rediscovered in France in 2019 and classified as a National Treasure, The Derision of Christ.
The two paintings, whose restoration was completed in 2024, constitute the starting point of this exhibition which, by bringing together around forty works, aims to highlight the extraordinary richness and incontestable novelty of the art of Cimabue. The artist was one of the first to open the way to naturalism in Western painting, seeking to represent the world, objects and bodies as they exist. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from oriental art, so popular until then, gave way to an inventive painting, seeking to suggest a three-dimensional space, bodies in volumes and modeled by subtle gradients, articulated limbs, natural gestures and human emotions.
After an introductory section devoted to the context of painting in Tuscany, in particular in Pisa in the middle of the 13th century, the route focuses on the Maestà of the Louvre: the novelties which are manifested in this painting have led certain art historians to qualify it as the “birth certificate of Western painting”. The restoration made it possible, in addition to rediscovering the variety and subtlety of the colors, to rediscover numerous details hidden by repainting which highlight the fascination of Cimabue and his patrons for the Orient, both Byzantine and Islamic.
The crucial question of the relationship between Duccio and Cimabue is then addressed. The route continues with a section built around the Cimabue diptych, of which the Louvre brings together for the first time the only three panels known to date. The narrative verve and freedom displayed by Cimabue in this work of shimmering colors make it an important and hitherto unsuspected precedent of Duccio's Maestà, a masterpiece of Sienese painting of the Trecento.
The exhibition concludes with the presentation of the great Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata of Giotto, intended for the same location as the Maestà of the Louvre, the tramezzo (the partition which separates the nave from the choir) of San Francesco of Pisa, and painted a few years later by the young and talented disciple of Cimabue. At the dawn of the 14th century, Duccio and Giotto, both deeply marked by the art of the great Cimabue who died in 1302, now embody the paths of the revival of painting.
