Cimabue table that was found in the kitchen of a French house purchased by the Louvre

In 2019, it was one of the stories that captured the most attention: a precious and rare panel painting by Cimabue, the Derision of Christ, which was hanging in the kitchen of a very ordinary house in Compiègne, a town of 40,000 inhabitants in Picardy, northern France. That work, a striking find, was later put up for auction, selling for as much as 24.1 million euros starting from an estimate of 4-6 (brokered by theItalian antiquarian Fabrizio Moretti, who expressed his excitement at being confronted with such an important work), and then the export was blocked by the French government because a purchase by the Louvre was at stake. Well, the acquisition was finalized and now that tablet enters the collection of the great museum in Paris.

A purchase that the Louvre described as “exceptional” as well as “essential” to its own collection because “Cimabue’s art, and this work bears admirable witness to it, heralds issues that will be central to European Renaissance painters: the illusionistic representation of space, that of bodies, of light, and of human feelings. ”To get one’s hands on the work, it was necessary to finance the operation with part of the resources from the Louvre Abu Dhabi. For the Parisian museum, The Mockery of Christ is the most important work by an Italian primitive on the market since 2004, when Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Madonna Stoclet was sold.

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Only about fifteen works by Cimabue are known, mostly done in fresco, as well as some large panels such as the Louvre’s Majesty itself, currently under restoration. As for the Mocking of Christ, we do not know its origin, although laboratory studies have confirmed that it belongs to a single ensemble of which two other known panels were part: the Flagellation in the Frick Collection in New York and the Madonna and Child in the National Gallery in London. The London panel was discovered like the one in the Louvre, that is, in a private collection, in 2000: it arrived in England probably in the mid-19th century. And it was perhaps in the early 19th century that the original set was dismembered and the Derision ended up in France, where it was acquired by the ancestors of its last owners, those who found it in their kitchen and sold it in 2019.

A work datable to the 1380s, it “allows a new look at the artist who, for the first time,” reads a Louvre note, “abandons the ’Greek manner,’ that is, Byzantine, paving the way for a rebirth of Western painting.” In the Derision, compared to the London and New York panels, Cimabue achieves even more modern results, as the iconographic subject allowed him to express himself with great freedom, in a bold and innovative language, dense with life and feeling. “It is indeed the first time,” the note continues, “that a painter imposed such a vivid naturalism in the rendering of the characters’ expressions and the restitution of their muscles in tension. The quest for naturalism and verisimilitude, the desire to create the illusion that the scene is unfolding before the viewer’s eyes, is similarly manifested in the rendering of space. The artist hides the faces of the characters in the background behind those of the characters in the foreground, a novel idea for the time. The humanization of the characters, depicted in the fashionable robes of the late thirteenth century, with colorful footwear and swords with precious sheaths, as well as the progressive complication of the architecture, mark the transition from a painting that sought to rival icons to a painting of vindicated modernity.” Also notable are the colors, set on a delicate color palette: gold, lapis lazuli, precious pigments. The Louvre even goes so far as to say, perhaps a little excessively, that "all the inventions traditionally attributed to Giotto and Duccio-the interest in naturalism, expressiveness and spatial construction for the great Florentine, and that for narrative and delicate, elegant colors for his Sienese alter ego - are already masterfully established in the Derision of Christ that makes Cimabue a pioneering artist who was to mark the two greatest painters of the next generation." According to the French museum, Giotto and Duccio would thus be the heirs of the innovations developed by Cimabue in the Derision of Christ. On all these aspects critics will not fail to express themselves in the weeks and months to come.

Then there is an iconographic peculiarity, namely, Cimabue does not attempt to represent a Gospel episode precisely, but tries, if anything, to stage the violence of Christ’s mockery, the moment when Jesus, after his arrest, suffers the outrage of the soldiers and the crowd. Cimabue “does not hesitate to bring together many episodes in a single narrative sequence in order to accentuate the dramatic effect. It is the very idea of mockery and outrage that is staged.”

The painting is in good condition, although there are gaps (which will not be restored). Before being presented in the museum’s halls, the Mockery of Christ will be restored to allow the public to better read the panel’s colors.

"Cimabue’s Derision of Christ," says Laurence des Cars, director of the Louvre, "constitutes a crucial stage in the history of art, marking the fascinating transition from icon to painting. It will soon be presented alongside the Majesty, another masterpiece by Cimabue belonging to the Louvre’s collections and whose restoration is currently underway. Together, the two paintings will be the subject of an exhibition-event in the spring of 2025."

Cimabue table that was found in the kitchen of a French house purchased by the Louvre

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