Upcoming: A New Look at Cimabue - At the Origins of Italian Painting

January 3 2025

Image of Upcoming: A New Look at Cimabue - At the Origins of Italian Painting

Picture: Louvre

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Louvre in Paris will be opening their latest Old Master Paintings exhibition on 22nd January 2025. A New Look at Cimabue - At the Origins of Italian Painting has been organised to celebrate both an acquisition and restoration of works by the artist.

According to the museum's website:

For the first time, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an exhibition to Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century. The exhibition is the product of two ‘Cimabue-centric’ events of great importance for the museum: the restoration of the Maestà and the acquisition of a heretofore-unseen Cimabue panel, rediscovered in France in 2019 and listed as a French National Treasure: Christ Mocked.

These two paintings, whose restoration was completed in 2024, provide the starting point for this exhibition, which, by bringing together some forty works, aims to illuminate the extraordinary richness and undeniable innovation of Cimabue’s art. Cimabue was one of the first to open Western painting to naturalism, seeking to represent the world, objects and bodies as they truly existed. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from Eastern art, so highly valued until this period, gave way to an inventive art of painting seeking to evoke a three-dimensional space, bodies in volume shaped by subtle shading, articulated limbs, natural postures and human emotions.

The show will run until 12th May 2025.

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