Die Verspottung Christi

For most of the last century nobody knew where this small panel was. It hung above a hotplate in a kitchen in Compiegne, north of France, taken for an old religious print, until an auctioneer clearing the house in 2019 recognised the hand of Cimabue, a Florentine painter working around 1280, at the very dawn of Italian panel painting. It sold that October for about 24 million euros, a record for any work made before the 16th century, and after an export ban the Louvre acquired it in 2023. It is tempera on a poplar panel, one leaf of a small folding devotional diptych, and on the back you can still trace the wax trails left by a candle that once burned in front of it.