PARIS.- The years 1280–1290 witnessed a fundamental, even revolutionary development in the history of Western painting: for the first time, a painter sought to depict the world, objects and figures around him as they actually existed. This visionary artist, of whom we know almost nothing and by whom only some fifteen works have come down to us, was Cimabue (Florence, about 1240–Pisa [?], 1301/1302).

This, the Musée du Louvre’s first exhibition dedicated to Cimabue, is the product of two events of great importance for the museum: the conservation work of his Maestà, often described as ‘the founding act of Western painting’, 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 conservation work was completed in 2024, provide the starting point for this exhibition, which, by bringing together some forty works, aims to illuminate the groundbreaking manner and astonishing invention by which Cimabue renewed the art of painting. It thus tells the fascinating story of a beginning.

Cimabue opened the way for naturalism in Western painting. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from Eastern art, particularly Byzantine icons, 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. He also developed a narrative verve that until now was thought to have originated with his flamboyant successors, Giotto and Duccio.

As the exhibition prologue states, we have very little information about Cenni di Pepo, known as Cimabue: we do not even know the meaning of his sobriquet. Only a few archival documents allow us to identify the artist and a few turning points in his career. It was Dante, in a passage of the Divine Comedy, who originated the artist’s myth in the early 14th century: by establishing this painter’s importance, the poet kindled the fascination that the name Cimabue has exerted from the age of the Medici to the present.

The introductory section, dedicated to the context of painting in Florence, Pisa and Assisi in the mid-13th century, sets the artistic scene into which Cimabue emerged. At that time, a work of art was appreciated for its conformity with the great prototypes of Eastern icons, thought to derive faithfully from acheiropoieta, icons ‘made without hand’. In these images, thought to be miraculous, figures were represented as belonging to the sacred world, not meant to resemble human beings. This explains their conventional anatomical deformations, as seen in the Cross of San Ranieri by Giunta Pisano, the dominant artistic figure of this era (Pisa, Museo di San Mateo), or in the Kahn Madonna (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art), one of the most fascinating icons of the period.

Cimabue aimed to break with this mode of representation. The visit then concentrates on the Louvre’s Maestà, the heart of the exhibition: the innovations manifest in this painting have led certain art historians to consider it ‘the founding act of Western painting’. This monumental work (4.27 x 2.8 m) illustrates Cimabue’s aspirations: to humanise the holy figures and create the illusion of reality, particularly in his rendering of space, with the throne seen at an angle. Conservation work has made visible not only the variety and subtlety of its colours (as in the extraordinarily glowing brightness of his blues, all painted in lapis lazuli), but many details that had been masked by overpainting, showing the fascination that the East, both Byzantine and Islamic, evoked in Cimabue and his patrons: for instance, the red border covered with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions and the Eastern textile draping the back of the throne.

The production of a monumental painting like the Maestà raises the question of Cimabue’s studio. As with so much else, we know nothing about it. However, Cimabue is reputed to have been Giotto’s teacher, and art historians think that the great Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna must have been influenced by the creations of the great Florentine painter. It is true that Cimabue’s manner influenced many; this exhibition juxtaposes the works of several of these artists, all of whom sought to awaken the emotional involvement of the faithful. The stylistic proximity of Duccio’s Crevole Madonna (Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) and Cimabue’s Maestà is eloquent, seen in the delicate modelling of the Virgin’s face and the plays of transparency.
With Cimabue the conviction was affirmed that each artist must establish his own manner, that traditional subjects must constantly be refreshed. Novelty became a central element in artistic appreciation. There resulted an extraordinary atmosphere of invention and emulation among painters.

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, particularly in Christ Mocked, make it an important and heretofore unsuspected precedent to Duccio’s Maestà, a masterpiece of 14th-century Sienese painting. In this little panel, Cimabue demonstrates prodigious inventiveness, rooting his composition in the daily life of his era and daring to clothe his figures in the garments of his time. In this way he echoes the perspective of the Franciscans, promotors of a more interiorised and immediate spirituality.

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.