Paris - Musée du Louvre - La Vierge et l'Enfant en majesté entourés de six anges (Maestà)
La Vierge et l'Enfant en majesté entourés de six anges (The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels), by one of the last great Byzantine Italian painters, Cenni di Pepo (Giovanni) Cimabue, also known as Bencivieni Di Pepo or in modern Italian, Benvenuto Di Giuseppe, was described by Vasari in 1568 as being found in the Church of Francesco in Pisa, whose high altar it adorned. Some historians have linked it, therefore, with Cimabue's stay in Pisa from 1301-1302. Stylistic analysis and comaprisons with a later Maestà by Cimabue for the Santa Trinità church in Florence, though, suggest an earlier date of execution--around 1820.
It sits in a frame decorated with twenty-six painted medallians depicting Christ, angels, prophets and saints. The iconography of the Maestà, the Child and the Virgin, glorified as queen of heaven, and surrounded by a host of angels, is accentuated by the monumentality of the retable and the sumptuous gold ground. The composition of the Maestà is symmetrical and dense. The imposing Virgin is hieratic, and the blessing gesture of the Christ Child is hardly child-like. Cimabue gently and subtly models the faces, endowing the figures with a new sense of humanity. The drapery, not simply drawn either, seems to fold naturally, following the movement of the bodies (for example, the cloaks of the two angels in the foreground whose knees protrude). Cimabue's palette is delicate, with shaded tones, notably in the angels' wings. The figures take on real solidity and an unprecedented visual presence. The artist prepared the ground for 14th-century Florentine art. His works raise the issues that would preoccupy his successors, notably Giotto: the representation of space, the representation of the body, and light.
Paris - Musée du Louvre - La Vierge et l'Enfant en majesté entourés de six anges (Maestà)
La Vierge et l'Enfant en majesté entourés de six anges (The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels), by one of the last great Byzantine Italian painters, Cenni di Pepo (Giovanni) Cimabue, also known as Bencivieni Di Pepo or in modern Italian, Benvenuto Di Giuseppe, was described by Vasari in 1568 as being found in the Church of Francesco in Pisa, whose high altar it adorned. Some historians have linked it, therefore, with Cimabue's stay in Pisa from 1301-1302. Stylistic analysis and comaprisons with a later Maestà by Cimabue for the Santa Trinità church in Florence, though, suggest an earlier date of execution--around 1820.
It sits in a frame decorated with twenty-six painted medallians depicting Christ, angels, prophets and saints. The iconography of the Maestà, the Child and the Virgin, glorified as queen of heaven, and surrounded by a host of angels, is accentuated by the monumentality of the retable and the sumptuous gold ground. The composition of the Maestà is symmetrical and dense. The imposing Virgin is hieratic, and the blessing gesture of the Christ Child is hardly child-like. Cimabue gently and subtly models the faces, endowing the figures with a new sense of humanity. The drapery, not simply drawn either, seems to fold naturally, following the movement of the bodies (for example, the cloaks of the two angels in the foreground whose knees protrude). Cimabue's palette is delicate, with shaded tones, notably in the angels' wings. The figures take on real solidity and an unprecedented visual presence. The artist prepared the ground for 14th-century Florentine art. His works raise the issues that would preoccupy his successors, notably Giotto: the representation of space, the representation of the body, and light.