The Painting Over the Hotplate

A Week to Empty the House

Philomène Wolf had seven days. A client in her nineties had sold her house in Compiègne, north of Paris, and moved into a retirement home, and someone needed to go through what was left before the place was cleared out^6,4. "I had a week to sort out the contents and empty it," Wolf told French media. "I had to make space in my diary, otherwise it would all have gone to the recycling"¹.

Somewhere in that week, on a wall between the open kitchen and the sitting room, she noticed a small, grimy religious panel hanging near the hotplate^1,4. Wolf suspected it might be a work of Italian primitivism⁴.

The house, a fairly ordinary property in a town 90 kilometers from Paris, gave no hint that anything inside it belonged in a museum¹. Cimabue, born Cenni di Pepo in Florence around 1240, is one of the hinge figures of Western painting, credited by the chronicler Giorgio Vasari as Giotto's teacher and regarded by historians as one of the first artists to pull Italian painting away from its rigid Byzantine models toward something more lifelike^11,5. Only a small number of his works survive today, some sources say around 11, others around 15, and almost all are frescoes or altarpieces housed in churches and major museums, not stray panels hanging over a stove^2,3.

Wolf took the panel to Paris. She brought it to Éric Turquin, the Old Master specialist whose gallery had previously identified a long-lost Caravaggio found in a French attic⁴. Turquin's colleague Jérôme Montcouquil and the team used infrared imaging and close study of the wood grain, comparing the panel's worm-eaten poplar support to two other known survivors from the same lost ensemble: The Flagellation of Christ at the Frick Collection in New York, and The Virgin and Child with Two Angels at the National Gallery in London, itself found by a Sotheby's valuer in a Suffolk country house in 2000^2,4.

The tunnels left by wood-boring larvae lined up across all three panels. "You can follow the tunnels made by the worms," Turquin told the Art Newspaper. "It's the same poplar panel"⁴. Style, gold ground, and fragments of an old frame pointed the same way. Turquin's team concluded, in his words, with "certitude" that the picture was a genuine Cimabue, part of a Passion cycle of eight scenes painted around 1280^6,4. The find was announced publicly in September 2019, valued by Turquin at between 4 and 6 million euros, itself a striking sum for a panel that had spent years collecting kitchen grease^1,6,12.

Not everyone was ready to call it settled. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones warned at the time that the picture was "being boldly called a Cimabue without wider discussion," noting that attributing seven-centuries-old panels is inherently risky, and that a follower or regional contemporary could not be entirely ruled out⁴.

The painting went to auction at Actéon Hôtel des Ventes in Senlis on 27 October 2019^5,6. The bidding blew straight through the 6 million euro ceiling. It kept climbing until it landed at roughly 24 million euros including fees, about four to five times the high estimate and a new auction record for a medieval painting^5,6,7. Auctioneer Dominique Le Coent put it simply afterward: "When a unique work of a painter as rare as Cimabue comes to market, you have to be ready for surprises"⁵.

The winning bidder was not named in the room. It later emerged that London dealer Fabrizio Moretti had placed the winning bid, buying on behalf of two collectors. "I bought it on behalf of two collectors," he told the New York Times. "It's one of the most important old master discoveries in the last 15 years. Cimabue is the beginning of everything. He started modern art. When I held the picture in my hands, I almost cried"³.

The woman who had lived with the painting above her hotplate died two days after the sale, leaving the proceeds to three heirs³. Weeks later, the French government declared Christ Mocked a national treasure, blocking its export for 30 months while the Louvre tried to raise the money to keep it in the country^1,13. In November 2023 the museum announced it had succeeded, acquiring the panel for the French state so it could hang beside Cimabue's Maestà, the painting that, decades earlier, had been treated as scrap-worthy clutter in a kitchen that was supposed to empty out in a week^8,9,10.

Timeline

1. June 2019Auctioneer Philomène Wolf notices the panel hanging above a hotplate while clearing a house in Compiègne^1,7.
2. September 2019Specialists led by Éric Turquin authenticate the panel as a work by Cimabue; discovery announced publicly, valued at €4-6 million^1,4.
3. 27 October 2019Christ Mocked sells at Actéon auction house in Senlis for about €24.18 million including fees, bought by Fabrizio Moretti on behalf of two collectors^5,3,6.
4. December 2019France declares the painting a national treasure and bars its export for 30 months^1,13.
5. November 2023The Louvre announces it has acquired Christ Mocked for the French state^8,9,10.

Pictures