IT IS always worth going to Paris for the sheer quality of Italian art on display in both the permanent collections and temporary shows. A recent day trip on Eurostar (the Transport Secretary could do well to reopen the discussion for direct high-speed trains from the north) forcibly underscored that with three exhibitions.
The first was the loan of 40 pieces from Rome in the Musée Jacquemart-André. Paintings by artists such as Antonello da Messina, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio in several cases looked more at home than they do in the Galleria Borghese on the Pincian Hill. The museum’s permanent collection alone is memorable for its Botticelli, Mantegnas, Crivellis and a Tiepolo ceiling in the tea room. Their current show surveys Artemisia Gentileschi (until 29 June).
Then, at the Petit Palais, there was a revelatory exhibition of the Spanish-born Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), who made his reputation in the Caravaggesque world of Rome and of Naples. There he was nicknamed “Lo Spagnoletto”; he never returned home. The exhibition “Shadows and Light”, featuring more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints, redefined his career as he developed beyond his early Caravaggism. His three great altarpieces of the Pietà, from The Prado, The Louvre, and the National Gallery, hung side by side.
A yet more brilliant spotlight is shone on the Tuscan artist Cimabue (1240-1302) at the Louvre. When the former royal palace first opened as an art gallery, it displayed hundreds of stolen works of art, looted from Belgium, Spain, Holland, and the Italian peninsula. In 1794, the government sanctioned the confiscation of art treasures to effect Napoleon’s grand vision of Paris as the new Rome.
More than 500 works were plundered from Italy alone (many others were lost or damaged in transit), of which half remained to be repatriated after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Many are still held by the French Government, the same government as has used public money and public sympathy to rebuild Notre-Dame. Among them is Cimabue’s recently restored Maestà (c.1280), a vast altarpiece (4.3 2.7m) that was seized in 1812, around which this little exhibition is centred.
To reach it, one needs Ariadne’s thread in the Denon Wing of the bloated museum. The Louvre advises that group visits to the exhibition are not allowed and that individual visitors may be asked to wait in a queue. No such restrictions are in place to deter hordes from trying to take selfies in front of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, their backs turned to Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana on the opposite wall, the largest picture that the Napoleonic troops stole from Italy. It is more than six metres tall and almost ten metres wide, dominating La Salle d’États.
Giovanni Cimabue was born in Florence and died in Pisa in his early sixties. His only signed and documented work is a fresco in the cathedral in Pisa, completed shortly before his death. Fewer than 20 works are attested to this extraordinary artist, who brought new ways of seeing to our Western eyes.
The opening section of Thomas Bohl’s exhibition delineates the predominantly Byzantine-inspired art of Tuscany (specifically Pisa), in which Cimabue grew up.
Though much debated, the celebrated 13th-century Byzantine icon, the “Kahn Madonna” (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) shows the Virgin wrapped in a maphorion and under dress of rich lapis lazuli and seated on an elaborately carved throne with her son, vested in vermilion and holding the scroll of the Law. That work and the Master of the Bigallo Crucifixion’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with two Angels (sold at Christie’s, London, for £276,800 in December 2005, it is now the highlight of the Musée d’Arts de Nantes), show how far Cimabue developed colour, a looser sense of composition, and hints of characterisation.
This subtle shift, which informed Cimabue’s artistic successors, such as Duccio (shown here in the Madonna of the Franciscans, from the Galeria Nazionale, Siena) and Giotto, is best seen in the three smallest panels on display: three scenes thought to come from the predella beneath a lost diptych, possibly depicting the Virgin and of the Crucifixion.
In 2000, the National Gallery in London accepted in lieu The Virgin and Child with two Angels (NG 6583), an egg-tempera painting (25.6 × 20.8cm). It was recognised as the central Maestà coming from the same altarpiece as a work in the Frick Collection in New York since 1950 of the Flagellation. Both works were first shown side by side in New York in 2006. The third panel turned up in France, back in 2019.
When an old lady’s house was cleared in Compiègne for sale, a devotional work hanging above the stove was thought to be of some interest. Her family consigned it for sale. The 90-year-old, who knew nothing of its provenance, had always thought of it as an icon and gone about her daily kitchen round under its gaze. At auction in 2023, it made €24 million. The nonagenarian owner died two days later.
Outmanoeuvred at auction, the Louvre later acquired it from the successful bidder.
The Mocking of Christ is an extraordinary work. The original owner thought of it as an icon, and, in feeling that, she was right, although early icons depict moments of stasis, rarely narratives apart from the life of Christ. It invites our contemplation of the vulnerability of the Christ, whose crown of thorns has fallen across his eyes, hemmed in by no fewer than 18 malevolent tormentors.
He holds his hands abjectly at his side as he is mocked. One of the soldiers beats down on his head with the flat of his sword. In the background, two buildings stand, the Praetorium and Caiaphas’s palace. Like Christ’s, our daily lives are played out between Church and State.
“A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting” is in the Salle Rosa (room 717), Level 1, Denon Wing, the Louvre, Paris, until 12 May. www.louvre.fr
