The Louvre museum is now the proud owner of two paintings by Cimabue, and they must be among the largest and smallest among his known works on wooden panels. The

Maestà

has been in the collection since the Napoleonic wars. It was never restituted after Waterloo for the simple reason that the Italians didn't ask for it back: no one was interested in 'primitive' Italian art in the early 19th Century. It has spent the last three year in the conservators' studio, and returns to greet its public with fresh, clear colours, and previously unseen details. 

The prompt for the conservation was the discovery, as recently as 2019, of a small painting hanging on a kitchen wall above a stove in a house about 80km north east of Paris. This turned out to be Cimabue's Mocking of Christ, on of three known sections from what is thought to have been a diptych. The other two known panels are in the National Gallery in London and the Frick in New York. This recently discovered gem was finally acquired by the Louvre last year, and has now been exhibited to the public for the first time, along with the newly restored

Maestà. 

The exhibition, which sadly closed on 12 May, provided a great opportunity to re-examine the relevance of Cimabue to the History of Art, and to think about his fame even before his work was even partially understood. It was called Revoir Cimabue: aux origines de la peinture Italienne - which was slightly awkwardly translated to A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting. Had I got my act together earlier, it would have been a perfect introduction to the National Gallery's Siena: The Rise of Painting (which is now in its final weeks, but can still be seen until 22 June). Despite this, Revoir Cimabue is still worth revisiting. After all, the next time you are in Paris the two paintings will be on the walls of the Italian galleries, the foundation, some would say, of everything that follows. As well as looking at the exhibition in detail, one of the things we will think about during this talk is the extent to which the artist's 'foundational' status is actually true.