# Why Nothing by Cimabue Is Signed, and What That Means for Attribution > The artist Vasari placed first in the history of Western painting left no signature and one documented work. The corpus is under ten panels, and worm holes hold three of them together. > The Study - 2026-08-02 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/why-nothing-by-cimabue-is-signed/ ## Key points - No work by Cimabue is signed or securely dated, and the accepted corpus runs to fewer than ten panels. - The frequently quoted figure of forty works is the Louvre's 2025 exhibition checklist, which includes other artists. - The Frick's Flagellation and the National Gallery's Virgin and Child were joined by wood grain, panel thickness, craquelure and worm holes as early as 2000. - The Louvre's own record prices the Compiegne panel at EUR 19.5 million excluding fees and dates the national treasure classification to 20 November 2019. ## One documented work, and no signature anywhere ## The corpus is much smaller than the round numbers suggest ## What a reconstructed corpus is, stated plainly ## The Compiegne panel and what the Louvre actually records ## Worm holes hold three panels together ## The honest formulation, and what a challenge would have to show An artist with no signature, one documented work in another medium, and a corpus of under ten panels built by argument is a useful reminder of what attribution actually is. Not the identification of a person, but the reconstruction of a hand from the objects it is agreed to have left behind. What rescued the Compiegne panel from that circularity was not connoisseurship at all. It was a colony of insects that ate through three pieces of poplar while they were still one object, several centuries before anyone thought to disagree about who had painted them. ## Questions **Did artists sign works in the thirteenth century?** Sometimes, and some of Cimabue's contemporaries did. The absence is normal rather than remarkable for the period, but it removes the simplest form of evidence and leaves a corpus that has to be assembled entirely by comparison and by physical association between objects. **How many works are accepted as by Cimabue?** Fewer than ten accepted works on panel, on Donal Cooper's count, with press accounts at the time of the 2019 discovery giving eleven works on wood. The figure of about forty comes from the Louvre's 2025 exhibition checklist, which includes works by other artists. **What is the single documented work?** The part of the apse mosaic in Pisa Cathedral depicting St John the Evangelist, made at the very end of his life. It is the sole surviving work documented as by the artist, and it is a mosaic rather than a panel, so it is an imperfect benchmark for the paintings. **Could the corpus be split between two artists?** It is the form a serious challenge would have to take, but no such division appears in the literature reached for this article. The physical association of the Louvre, Frick and National Gallery panels through wood grain and worm holes constrains any rearrangement of at least those three. ## Sources - [1] Musee du Louvre, collection record for Cimabue, La Derision du Christ, inv. RFML.PE.2023.33.1. - [2] Musee du Louvre, exhibition page, 'A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting', 22 January to 12 May 2025. - [3] Donal Cooper, 'A long-lost Cimabue has emerged in a French kitchen', Apollo, 14 October 2019. - [4] Donal Cooper, 'The Louvre restores Cimabue to his rightful place', Apollo, 3 February 2025. - [5] The Frick Collection, 'Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting', exhibition record, 2006, on the physical evidence linking the Flagellation and the National Gallery panel. - [6] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. I, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi, Macmillan and the Medici Society, 1912-14, Project Gutenberg text. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Cimabue', for the Pisa Cathedral mosaic of St John the Evangelist as the sole surviving documented work and for the absence of signatures. Tertiary source; should be replaced with the Pisa Cathedral fabric records and Thomas Bohl (ed.), Cimabue: Aux origines de la peinture italienne, Silvana Editoriale, 2025. - [8] Finestre sull'Arte, on Eric Turquin's 2019 attribution and the reflectographic examination of the panel. - [9] Anna Brady, 'Kitchen Cimabue sells for 24.1m euros', The Art Newspaper, 27 October 2019, separating the hammer from the premium-inclusive total.