Is the tablet discovered in the kitchen of a private home in the French province by Cimabue?

Great French media coverage was given to a discovery announced yesterday: in a house in Compiègne, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants in Picardy, northern France, a panel painting was found that antiquarian Eric Turquin attributed to Cimabue (Florence, c. 1240 - Pisa, 1302). The work, depicting a mocked Christ, measures 25.8 by 20.3 centimeters, is painted with tempera and gold ground on poplar panel, and Turquin speculates that it is an element of a subsequently dismembered 1280 diptych on which stories of Christ were painted and of which only two scenes are known at present, the Flagellation preserved at the Frick Collection in New York and the Madonna and Child Enthroned at the National Gallery in London, both of which measure quite similar to the panel found at Compiègne. According to reconstructions, the diptych consisted of two compartments, divided into four scenes; Turquin believes that one of the eight scenes was indeed the Mocked Christ of Compiègne.

The discovery came about purely by chance, according to what is known: the owner, an elderly lady, had in fact reported it to the Actéon auction house in Compiègne, claiming that it had always hung “between the living room and the kitchen,” and that the family had considered it a work of no particular value (not least because the lady cannot say where it came from). Following the report, the work (when experts went to the Compiègne home, they let it be known, the table was hanging on a wall near the kitchen stove) was subjected to reflectographic examinations that revealed an excellent state of preservation. According to Turquin, “the attribution will not provoke discussion because, comparing the work with other known Cimabue paintings, it is evident that the hand is the same.” Playing in favor of the attribution to the Florentine master would be, according to Turquin, the punching, the style, and the type of decoration on the gold background.

The work will be offered for sale by Actéon on Oct. 27 in Senlis, and the estimate ranges between €4 million and €6 million. It will be the first auction sale of a work by Cimabue in decades.

“Our panel,” Actéon’s Dominique Le Coënt-de Beaulieu points out, “fits perfectly into the reconstruction of the diptych. The traces of the ancient frame, the small round dots executed with the punch in the same manner as the other known panels, the style, the ornamentation of the gold background, the correspondence of the panels and their state of preservation confirm that our panel, as well as those preserved in the National Gallery and the Frick Collection, were part of the left compartment of the same diptych.”

“Christ,” explains Stéphane Pinta, a specialist in ancient art at the Turquin cabinet, “occupies the central part of the work, and crowded around him, as if they were plates of a scale, are the two compact human groups. Their arrangement, clasped against each other, gives rise to a feeling of strong suffocation, reinforced by the play of intertwined arms and legs, which strongly express the idea of Christ being surrounded, and added to this is the play of gazes: the faces, or rather these masks characterized by sneering grimaces and frowning expressions, the looks charged with animosity defined by a linear, soft drawing that shapes natural forms through the play of luminous accents. In contrast to this tumult, Christ surpasses this human group with his stature, which is not only physical but also moral. To the invectives and blows, he opposes a serenity that translates with his attitude of abandonment, of self-sacrifice that is evident from his dangling arms and serene expression. The facial features are described by a soft drawing: the nose, mouth, beard and hair have nothing more conventional. We are in the presence of a real, surrendering human being, and no longer before a powerful, almost abstract deity. In this sense, our table is one of the first testimonies of Western art.”

Now all that remains is to await the opinion of scholars who deal with Cimabue, since the debate has yet to open. Eric Turquin has made headlines in recent times for his role in the “re-emergence” of the so-called Judith of Toulouse, a work that the antiquarian assigned to Caravaggio (the attribution is highly debated, however), which was exhibited amidst great controversy between 2016 and 2017 at the Pinacoteca di Brera and was finally purchased this summer by a private individual who will probably lend it to a major museum. Specialists are convinced that there are still many valuable works hidden in provincial homes.

Is the tablet discovered in the kitchen of a private home in the French province by Cimabue?

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