The Virgin and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Six Angels (Maestà)
Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo) (c. 1240-1301/1302) · c. 1280 (fourth quarter of the 13th century)
Four and a quarter metres of gilded poplar rise in front of you, and at the centre the Virgin sits enthroned with the Christ Child on her knee, presented not as a mother in a room but as the Queen of Heaven on a throne that functions like a piece of architecture. Six angels, three to each side, stand in stacked pairs holding the throne as if it were weightless. The Child raises his hand in blessing and holds a scroll. Around the outer frame run twenty-six small medallions with the Redeemer, archangels, prophets and apostles, a compressed summary of sacred history wrapped around the main image. The altarpiece came from the church of San Francesco in Pisa, where it would have towered over a congregation in candlelight rather than under gallery spotlights.
Cimabue worked in egg tempera over a ground of gold leaf, a Byzantine technique in which the gold is not a background colour but a surface of divine light. Look closely at the Virgin's blue mantle and you will see fine gold striations, called chrysography, that describe the folds. What makes the picture a hinge in European art is the throne. Cimabue gives it visible depth, receding steps and foreshortened sides, so that the angels occupy genuine space rather than floating symmetrically on a flat field. The faces, too, have softened shadow along the nose and jaw, an early move toward weight and volume.
Seized in Italy during the Napoleonic campaigns, the panel entered the Louvre in the early nineteenth century and is one of the oldest paintings in the museum. Cimabue is the artist Dante named in the Divine Comedy as the man who held the field in painting until Giotto eclipsed him, which is exactly the comparison the Louvre invites by hanging this work beside Giotto's Saint Francis.
Did You Know? Dante used Cimabue as the very emblem of fleeting fame, writing that he thought he held the field in painting until Giotto came along and the cry for him grew faint.
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