In Paris, the Louvre opens an unprecedented exhibition devoted to a mysterious painter who has been fascinating for centuries

The Louvre Museum in Paris presents an unprecedented exhibition on Italian on Wednesday January 22 Cimabue (around 1240-1302) which revolutionized Western painting at the end of the 13th century, paving the way to naturalism, but whose biography remains incomplete. Entitled “Review Cimabue. To the origins of Italian painting ”, she understands around forty works, some of which among this visionary painter reached to us and which can be moved, as well as rare illuminated manuscripts.

Break with conventions

Through a thematic course, the exhibition highlights the novelty of its way of painting between 1280 and 1290: seeking to suggest a three-dimensional space, the realism of the bodies and objects of its time, nonexistent until then, it broke radically With representation agreements inherited from oriental art, in particular 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 loaned by Italy.

A table classified national treasure

Two paintings, whose restoration ended at the end of 2024, constitute the pivot of the exhibition. The first, a monumental virgin to the child brought back from the Napoleonic countryside and ceded to France by Italy, is called the “maestà”. The work has often been qualified as a birth certificate of Western painting “due to the humanization of holy figures and the illusionist quest for the painter, in particular in the rendering of space with the throne seen from bias .

Its restoration was “the opportunity to discover unpublished details that we no longer perceived at all, including the subtlety of the colors, whose bright brightness of the Blues all painted in Lapis-Lazuli, and fragments of Arabic writing , in which he was one of the first to be interested, “explains Thomas Bohl, curator in the painting department and exhibition commissioner.

The second, “the derision of Christ”, a small painting retracing a passage from the life of Jesus where he is mocked before his flogging, was acquired in 2023.
He was rediscovered in France with individuals in 2019 and classified national treasure. It is part of a diptych whose Louvre brings together for the first time the only three panels known to date (the other two have been loaned by 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 clothing characters of his time. He thus echoes the concerns of the Franciscans, promoters of a more internalized and immediate spirituality, ”specifies the commissioner.

Rare information on Cimabue

Cenni di Pepo alias Cimabue has long remained a mysterious painter who has fascinated for seven centuries poets, artists, collectors and historians of art for seven centuries. Knowledge of his biography is very thin, as the exhibition prologue recalls.
It is unknown until the meaning of his nickname and only a few archive documents make it possible to identify the artist and give rare benchmarks in his career.

“It is Dante, in a passage from 'the Divine Comedy', which forges the myth at the beginning of the 14th century: by establishing its importance, it is at the origin of the fascination that the name of Cimabue will exercise medicali to To today ”, underlines Mr. Bohl.

“Florence, sitting, Pisa, we know, however, that he worked in the largest churches in Italy and experienced extraordinary renown,” he adds. The exhibition is concluded with the presentation of the great “Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata” from Giotto.

With AFP

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