Cimabue was a Florentine painter, born around 1240 and dead around 1302, who painted the great Madonnas and crucifixes of Tuscany before Giotto, and the man Dante said Giotto outshone. In 2019 a small panel of his, Christ Mocked, was found hanging above a kitchen hotplate in northern France and sold for about 24 million euros, a record at auction for any work made before 1500.
Dante used his name to say that fame does not last. Today the name is in the news for a different reason, and the story starts in a kitchen.
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The owner was a woman in her nineties who was selling her house in Compiègne, north of Paris. Her family saw an old religious icon of little value. A local auctioneer noticed it while valuing the house, and the panel went to Eric Turquin, a Paris expert, who tested it with infrared light and found it matched Cimabue's other work.
The auction house estimated it at four to six million euros. On 27 October 2019 it sold for 24 million. Two months later France blocked its export, and in November 2023 the Louvre bought it.
That price is stranger than it looks. Not one painting under Cimabue's name is tied to him by a document. The only work that records prove is his is a mosaic of Saint John in Pisa Cathedral, made in 1301 and 1302. Everything else, the kitchen panel included, rests on comparison and attribution.
What You'll Discover
Who he was before Giotto.
Why his Assisi frescoes turned dark.
What he changed in the Madonna.
What Dante said about him.
What the flood took from him.
Which works are really his.