Renaissance painting found in elderly woman's kitchen sells for £20.7m

A Renaissance masterpiece found in an elderly French woman's kitchen was sold for £20.7million at auction, making it the most expensive medieval painting ever sold. The woman aged in her 90's had the artwork hanging for decades directly above a cooking hotplate in her kitchen and was completely unaware of the significance of the masterpiece named 'Christ Mocked'. The painting measuring just 20cm by 26cm, went for more than four times the pre-sale estimate of €4-6 million at Acteon auction house in Senlis, north of Paris on October 27. The 90-year-old will now be receiving the majority of the sale money which she had thought was simply an old religious work.

The unsigned painting

Earlier back in June, an auctioneer spotted the painting while valuing furniture ahead of the woman's house move in Compiegne in northern France and suggested that she should get the painting assessed by experts. The unsigned painting on a wooden panel is attributed to the 13th century Florentine artist Cimabue, also known as Cenni di Pepo. According to the experts, the painting was probably part of a larger display of eight small panels of the passion and crucifixion of Christ that is believed to be painted back in 1280. Two of the panels are also on display at the Frick Collection in New York and the National Gallery in London. Dominique Le Coent, of Aceton auction house, told an international media that it was the first time a Cimabue work had ever gone under the hammer. 

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Cimabue, the forefather of Italian Renaissance

Cimabue was one of the most pioneering artists of the early Italian Renaissance and only 11 works painted on wood have been attributed to him, none of them signed. The art experts at Turquin used infrared reflectography to confirm that the piece was a part of a larger diptych. The National Gallery has reportedly described Cimabue's work as representing a crucial moment in the history of art when Italian painters were exploring the naturalistic depiction of forms and three- dimensional space. Cimabue is also considered the forefather of the Italian Renaissance as he broke from the Byzantine style popular in the Middle Ages. 

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