A New Look at CimabueAt the Origins of Italian Painting

For the first time, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an exhibition to Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century. The exhibition is the product of two ‘Cimabue-centric’ events of great importance for the museum: the restoration of the Maestà and the acquisition of a heretofore-unseen Cimabue panel, rediscovered in France in 2019 and listed as a French National Treasure: Christ Mocked.

These two paintings, whose restoration was completed in 2024, provide the starting point for this exhibition, which, by bringing together some forty works, aims to illuminate the extraordinary richness and undeniable innovation of Cimabue’s art. Cimabue was one of the first to open Western painting to naturalism, seeking to represent the world, objects and bodies as they truly existed. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from Eastern art, so highly valued until this period, gave way to an inventive art of painting seeking to evoke a three-dimensional space, bodies in volume shaped by subtle shading, articulated limbs, natural postures and human emotions.

After an introductory section dedicated to the context of painting in Tuscany – and specifically Pisa – in the mid-13th century, a good deal of the visit focuses on the Louvre’s Maestà; innovations appearing in this painting have led certain art historians to consider it ‘the founding act of Western painting’. Restoration has made visible not only the variety and subtlety of its colours, but many details that had been masked by previous overpaintings, showing the fascination that the East, both Byzantine and Islamic, evoked in Cimabue and his patrons.

The crucial question of the relationship between Cimabue and Duccio is then addressed. The visit continues with a section constructed around Cimabue’s eight-panel diptych, of which the Louvre has brought together for the first time the only three panels known today. The narrative vitality and liberty deployed by Cimabue in this work of shimmering colours make it an important and heretofore unsuspected precedent to Duccio’s Maestà, a masterpiece of 14th-century Sienese painting.

The exhibition concludes with the presentation of Giotto’s great Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, intended for the same architectural placement as the Louvre’s Maestà: the tramezzo, or rood screen (the partition separating the nave from the choir) of the church of San Francesco in Pisa, painted a few years later by Cimabue’s talented young disciple. At the dawn of the 14th century, Duccio and Giotto – both profoundly influenced by the art of the great Cimabue, who died in 1302 – would embody the new possibilities of the art of painting.

Curator:

Thomas Bohl, Curator in the Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre

Acknowledgement

With the support of Lusis.