The Mocking of Christ

A small devotional panel of about 1280 that hung for decades above a hotplate in a kitchen in Compiegne, sold in 2019 for the highest price ever paid for a pre-1500 work of art, and is now the oldest painting in the Louvre. It is one of three surviving leaves of a dismembered diptych whose other panels are in the Frick and the National Gallery.

What it is

A small devotional panel, 25.8 by 20.3 centimetres and 1.2 centimetres thick, painted in egg tempera on a gold-leaf ground over a thinned and slightly bowed poplar panel prepared with gesso. It shows Christ surrounded by figures who strike and mock him, set against architecture rendered in the reverse perspective of the Byzantine tradition that Cimabue inherited and was in the process of abandoning.

Its size is the first thing to understand about it. This is not an altarpiece. It is an object made to be held, or set on a small altar in a private room, and looked at closely by one person at a time. That is why it survived: small panels get moved, inherited and forgotten in a way that large ones do not.

The dismembered diptych

The panel does not stand alone. Scholars identify it as one of the surviving leaves of what is now called the Diptych of Devotion, a small folding devotional object of around 1280 that was broken up at some unknown point and scattered.

Three of its panels are now known and all three are in public collections on two continents. The Flagellation of Christ has been in the Frick Collection in New York since 1950. The Virgin and Child with Two Angels was found in Suffolk in 2000 and is in the National Gallery in London. This panel, the third, spent an unknown number of decades in a kitchen in northern France. A fourth panel, hypothesised to show the Betrayal of Christ, has never been found; the reconstruction rests on comparison with intact Florentine and Venetian diptychs of the early fourteenth century.

The reconstruction is not a stylistic guess. The panels carry matching woodworm tunnels, which is physical evidence that they were once part of a single piece of wood and were bored while joined. Damage at the lower left of this panel indicates where it was cut away from the original frame.

How it was found

In June 2019 an elderly woman in her nineties in Compiegne, north of Paris, was selling the house she had lived in, a building put up in the 1960s. An expert sent by the Acteon auction house to clear the contents found the panel hanging on the kitchen wall above the hotplate. The owner believed it to be a Greek icon of no particular consequence.

The first estimate placed on it, before anyone understood what it was, was 300,000 to 400,000 euros. That figure is worth holding on to, because it is what a well-run regional auction house thought a good early panel was worth before attribution work was done. The eventual result was more than sixty times it.

How it was attributed

The panel was sent to Eric Turquin and his colleagues at the Galerie Turquin in Paris, the firm most associated in France with the technical examination of disputed old master pictures. Infrared reflectography revealed the underdrawing beneath the paint surface, and the character of that underdrawing was consistent with the small number of works securely given to Cimabue.

The comparison is harder than it sounds. Only about a dozen works are attributed to Cimabue at all, and not one of them is signed. There is no autograph benchmark to measure against; the corpus is itself an argument built by connoisseurship and technical analysis over a century and a half. An attribution to Cimabue is therefore always an attribution to a reconstructed hand rather than to a documented artist, and this record treats it that way.

What raises this case above the ordinary is the woodworm. Style can be argued about indefinitely. Tunnels bored through two panels while they were physically joined cannot.

The sale

Acteon offered the panel at its Hotel des Ventes in Senlis on 27 October 2019, with the estimate revised upward to four to six million euros once the attribution was in hand. About eight hundred people attended. The London dealer Fabrizio Moretti bid successfully on behalf of two anonymous clients, later reported to be Chilean nationals resident in the United States.

The hammer fell at 19.5 million euros. With buyer's fees the total came to approximately 24 million. Almost every account of this sale reports a single figure without saying which of the two it is, and dollar conversions of 26, 26.8 and 27 million all circulated depending on the day the writer converted. The euro figures are the real ones, and there are two of them.

It was, so far as is known, the first work by Cimabue ever offered at public auction, and it set the record for any pre-1500 work of art.

What happened after the hammer

This is the half of the story that the coverage dropped, and the reason this record exists in the form it does.

On 23 December 2019 the French state refused an export licence and classified the panel a National Treasure. The classification froze the object in France for thirty months and gave the state a window in which to raise the purchase price and buy it for the nation. That is not a formality; it is a compulsory delay imposed on a private owner who had just paid twenty-four million euros for a picture he could not take home.

The campaign ran past the original window. The Louvre completed the acquisition in November 2023, four years after the sale. The panel is now the oldest work in the museum's painting department, and it hangs in the same collection as Cimabue's Maesta, which entered the Louvre in the nineteenth century.

A reader who found only the 2019 reporting would conclude that this painting is in a private collection somewhere in the United States. It has been French state property, on public display in Paris, since 2023.