The discovery in a French kitchen of a 13th century panel, attributed to Florentine master Cimabue, is set to revive interest in a pioneering artist dubbed the “father of Western painting” – and whet the appetites of art collectors around the world.

Early in June, French auctioneer Philomène Wolf showed up at a designer home in the northern town of Compiègne for a routine house clearance. The property’s owner, an elderly woman, had asked Wolf to value her belongings and sift through a pile of junk bound for the dump. Little did she know she was poised to make a discovery that would send ripples of excitement across the art world.

Hiding in plain sight above the bar in an open-plan kitchen, a small wooden panel caught the young auctioneer’s eye. Exquisitely crafted, it was an unsigned painting depicting a scene from Christ’s Passion.

“The lady said she thought it had belonged to her family for a long time, but that it was just a religious icon,” Wolf recalls. “It could well have been destined for the bin.”

The auctioneer thought there was more to the small poplar panel and its vivid portrayal of Jesus surrounded by an angry crowd. Measuring just 24 centimetres by 20 and painted in egg tempera, it bore the hallmarks of the work of late Medieval Italian artists, known in France as primitifs italiens, and appeared to have been sawed off a larger opus.

Following her hunch, Wolf took the painting to Eric Turquin, a prominent Paris-based expert in Old Masters. After examining the find, Turquin’s team stated with “certitude” that its author was none other than Cimabue, the legendary Florentine master whose known works are so rare – and so jealously guarded – they have never been auctioned in modern times.

A giant in art history

The “Mocking of Christ”, Turquin concluded, was part of an eight-part diptych painted by Cimabue around 1280, of which only two other pieces are known: the “Flagellation of Christ”, part of the Frick Collection in New York, and the “Madonna and Child Enthroned between Two Angels”, found under a staircase in an English country house two decades ago and now at the National Gallery in London.

Turquin said there was no doubt about the authenticity of the painting, as it reflected the innovative style pioneered by Giotto’s master.

“We can see the likeness in the facial expressions, the movement and the tentative perspective that define Cimabue’s contribution to art,” said Stéphane Pinta, an art specialist with the Cabinet Turquin in Paris. Furthermore, tests using infrared light prove that tunnels made by woodworms in the panel match those on the other two Cimabue paintings, he added.

“This kind of find is what we wake up for every morning,” said Pinta, hailing “a major discovery” for art historians. “Cimabue is the father of Western painting, the one who broke with the rules of Byzantine art, introducing the rudiments of expression and perspective.”

FRANCE 24 spoke to some of the most prominent experts of Cimabue's work, who marvelled at the news.

“This is an extremely unusual discovery,” said Holly Flora, a professor of art history at Tulane University and the author of several works on the Florentine painter. “The number of surviving panel paintings by Cimabue is small – fewer than ten accepted works. So this painting is a hugely important discovery for Cimabue's oeuvre.”

In the artist’s native Florence, Angelo Tartuferi, curator of early paintings at the world-famous Uffizi Galleries, hailed “one of those extraordinary events that can mark a turning point in our knowledge of the history of early Italian painting”. He added: “Cimabue is a giant in the history of Italian art, the greatest painter of the 13th century.”

In the shadow of Giotto

In the beginning, there was Cimabue – or so Giorgio Vasari recounts in his famous “Lives of the Painters”.

The Florentine painter, whose real name was Cenni di Pepo, 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. Cimabue’s reputation as the forerunner of Renaissance painting owes much to his depiction as such by art history’s precursor.

Wrecked by war and disease, Italy was a field of ruins when, “in the year 1240, there was born in the city of Florence, Giovanni, surnamed Cimabue […], who was to shed the first light on the art of painting,” Vasari wrote. His pupil’s light would shine brighter, however, until “Giotto truly eclipsed Cimabue’s fame.”

Story continues