ART102: Art History 2

The Frick as a Place For a Small Reunion

By: Carol Vogel

New York Times, September 29, 2006

W

hen experts at Sotheby's in London were cataloging some old master paintings at Benacre Hall, a Palladian villa near Lowestoft in Suffolk, England, six years ago, they came across an 8-by-10-inch painted wood panel. They had a hunch it might be the work of Cimabue, the 13th-century Italian painter and mosaicist who predated Giotto and Duccio, paving the way for early Renaissance artists.

One of the first things the experts did was to bring the panel—a work on gold ground depicting a Madonna and Child flanked by a pair of angels—to New York to examine it alongside ''The Flagellation of Christ,'' a Cimabue panel in the Frick Collection. Not only are the two the same size, but technical studies showed they were once part of the same larger religious work, perhaps even an altarpiece.

That brief visit to the Frick was the last time the Cimabues were seen together in the United States. Now a small, focused exhibition, ''Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting,'' opening at the Frick on Tuesday, will once again reunite the works, two of only six known panel paintings by Cimabue in existence.

After its trip to the Frick, the panel from Benacre Hall, ''The Virgin and Child Enthroned With Two Angels,'' was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in London. In the last year the panels have been on public view in two exhibitions. ''Cimabue in Pisa,'' at the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, Italy, placed the panels within the context of 13th- and 14th-century painting in Pisa. ''Reunion: Bringing Early Italian Paintings Back Together,'' at the National Gallery in London, was a show of early Italian painting recently acquired by the gallery.

''Each show was different,'' said Holly Flora, a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Frick who is now the curator at the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan, and who organized the Frick's show. ''Ours shows Cimabue as a painter of small things. It gives a picture of how fluent the artist was in this scale and media.''

Normally the Frick holds special exhibitions in its basement galleries, but this time it is using its Cabinet Gallery, a small space just to the right of the main entrance. ''It's like a little chapel,'' Ms. Flora said. In addition to the two Cimabues, the show includes loans of other examples of Italian Renaissance devotional art from the Metropolitan Museum and the Morgan Library.

''Hopefully this show will make people think about form and function within the context of Italian art,'' Ms. Flora said. ''Rather than ask the question 'Is it or isn't it?,' this is about how Cimabue departed from the traditional iconlike forms and instead portrayed religious figures in a more realistic way.''

Large details from the recently discovered “Virgin and Child Enthroned With Two Angels,” left, and “The Flagellation of Christ,” both by Cimabue.