An Elderly Woman Discovered She Had Been Storing a Rare Renaissance Painting in Her Kitchen—and It Could Fetch $6 Million at Auction Next Month

For years, a painted panel
depicting a scene from Christ’s passion and crucifixion hung in the
kitchen of a nonagenarian woman in Compiègne, France. She thought
it was an old knockoff. 

It turns out that it was a rare
Renaissance treasure that is more than 700 years
old. 

The painting, which she stored
above her hot plate, is believed to be the handiwork of Cenni di
Pepo, also known as Cimabue, a 13th-century Florentine painter
famous for mentoring Giotto. It was discovered in June when the
woman decided to sell her house and some of her belongings. Actéon,
a small auction house from the nearby town of Senlis, was contacted
for an appraisal.

“I had a week to give an expert
view on the house contents and empty it,” Philomène Wolf, the
auctioneer who discovered the painting, told Le
Parisien. 

Wolf, who began her auction
career just last year, realized the potential of the painting
immediately. “You rarely see something of such quality,” she
explained. “I immediately thought it was a work of Italian
primitivism. But I didn’t imagine it was a Cimabue.”

The auctioneer thought that the
unsigned, tempera-on-panel painting could be worth as much as
€300,000 to €400,000 ($330,688 to $440,918). After bringing it to
Eric Turquin, an Old Master appraiser based in Paris, she learned
it might be valued at 15 times that sum. (Turquin is no stranger to
finding diamonds in the rough: He played a key role in
the sale of a long-lost painting believed to be by Caravaggio,
which was due to be sold at auction for as much as $171 million
before billionaire Tom Hill purchased it in a
private sale.)

The newly discovered Cimabue is
now headed to auction at Actéon on October 27. Turquin, who is
selling the painting in conjunction with the auction house,
estimates that it will to go for between €4 million and €6 million
($4.4 million and $6.6 million). The other objects of value in the
woman’s home  were sold for roughly €6,000 combined, while the
rest of her property went to the dump.

Titled the
Mocking of
Christ, the tiny panel
depicts one of the stages of the Passion of the Christ. Turquin
believes it made up part of a polyptych by Cimabue, which also
included the Flagellation
of Christ and the
Madonna and Child Enthroned
Between Two Angels. 

Cimabue’s Flagellation of Christ hangs in the Frick Collection in New York,
having been purchased by the museum in 1950. Madonna and Child Enthroned Between Two
Angels has been in the
collection of the National Gallery in London since 2000, when the
museum snatched up the work for £7.2 million ($9 million) ahead of
a planned auction. 

Turquin told The Art
Newspaper he believes the poplar panel on which
the Mocking of
Christ is rendered is
the same as those of the other two paintings. All three works show
evidence of larvae infestation, he added, noting that the pattern
of tunnels made by the wood-eating insects matches up across the
series of works.

The post An Elderly Woman Discovered She Had Been Storing a
Rare Renaissance Painting in Her Kitchen—and It Could Fetch $6
Million at Auction Next Month appeared first on artnet
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