This would have been a very suitable post for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God on New Year’s Day as it is about one of the very greatest early Italian paintings of the Virgin and Child.
The Art Newspaper has a fascinating article about the cleaning and restoration of La Maestà, painted by Cimabue about 1280 for a friary church in Pisa which was plundered by the French in the Napoleonic period and is now in the Louvre. Newly restored it will be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Louvre in coming months that investigates and re-evaluates Cimabue’s place in the development of Italian art.
The cleaning is a revelation as the before and after photographs show. Instead of the sombre tones which dominated the painting now it glows with warm colour, a rich blue and an exuberant rose, and radiates, for all its statuesque pose a calm joyfulness that had for years, maybe centuries, been hidden by varnish.
The illustrated article can be viewed at Was Cimabue the true father of the Italian Renaissance? New restoration reveals pivotal innovations
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