From kitchen wall to the Louvre: Cimabue show sheds new light on ‘father of Western painting’
A long-lost Cimabue panel discovered on a kitchen wall north of Paris in 2019 is at the heart of a landmark exhibition on the Florentine master, which opens at the Louvre on Wednesday, showcasing restored masterpieces and bringing to light his pioneering role at the dawn of the Renaissance.
In the beginning there was Cimabue, “who was to shed the first light on the art of painting” – until he was “eclipsed” by his pupil Giotto.
The story, told by Giorgio Vasari in his “Lives of the Painters”, has for centuries been the standard account of the origins of the Renaissance, cementing Cimabue’s role as a transitional figure who paved the way for his more illustrious disciple.
Born in 1240, Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue, is the first protagonist of Vasari’s 1550 classic, a survey of three centuries of Italian artistic genius – and Florentine self-promotion – leading up to Michelangelo. The tale of how he came to be eclipsed by Giotto had been told before by Dante in his “Divine Comedy”, begun shortly after Cimabue’s death in 1302.
Imagining a brief encounter with the painter in purgatory, Dante observed: “In painting Cimabue thought he held the field but now it’s Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame is dimmed.”
Such accounts have overshadowed not only Cimabue’s fame, but many of his achievements too, according to a landmark exhibition showing at the Louvre from Wednesday, which brings together restored and newly acquired works by the Florentine master.
“Never before had tensed muscles been painted in such detail,” said Bohl, highlighting Cimabue’s ability to convey movement and emotion.
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