Cimabue vs Giotto

The Castelfiorentino Madonna is both moving and kinda funny at the same time, right? Middle-aged baby Jesus facepalming his mom?

(I glean by the way the name is pronounced Chim-ah-boo-eh.)

Cimabue’s Mocking of Christ has a great story:

The painting was discovered hanging above the hotplate in the kitchen of an elderly woman living in Compiègne, northern France. The woman was in her nineties and was selling the house, which had been built in the 1960s, and moving from the area. Ahead of the move in June 2019 the owner called in a local auctioneer to determine if any of her possessions were worth selling; the remainder were to be thrown away. The owner and her family recognised the Mocking of Christ only as an old religious icon and thought it had little value. The owner could not remember how the work came to be in her possession, but thought it to be of Russian origin.

The auctioneer had only one week to evaluate the contents of the house, but noticed the Mocking of Christ almost immediately. They thought it to be of an Italian primitivist nature and possibly worth €300,000 to €400,000. The owner was advised to send it away for testing and it went to Eric Turquin and his colleagues at the Turquin Gallery in Paris. Testing under infrared light revealed similarities with other works by Cimabue and it was attributed to the artist. Some other items from the house sold at auction for €6,000 and the remainder were sent to landfill.

The work was put up for auction at the Actéon Hôtel des Ventes, in Senlis, Oise, on 27 October 2019 with an estimate of €4–6 million. Some 800 people attended the auction and there was interest from several foreign museums. The work reached a hammer price of €19.5 million, which reached €24 million once selling fees were included. The winning bid was placed by the London-based dealer Fabrizio Moretti, on behalf of two anonymous collectors. This set a new world record for a pre-1500 artwork sold at auction. The price was believed to be so high as it was the first time a work by Cimabue had sold at auction. Both seller and purchaser decided to remain anonymous, though the buyers have been reported to be two Chilean nationals living in the United States.

Cimabue also did a Flagellation of Christ, which is now at The Frick:

Cimabue is mentioned in Purgatorio Canto XI:

Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse!
com’ poco verde in su la cima dura,
se non è giunta da l’etati grosse!

Credette Cimabue ne la pittura
tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura:

Or, as Google Translate puts it:

Oh, vain glory of human powers!
How little green endures upon the summit,
unless it is overtaken by cruder ages!

Cimabue believed that in painting
he held the field, but now Giotto has the acclaim,
so that the fame of the former is dimmed.

Giotto does seem to take it to the next level for sure:

It’s sometimes claimed that this is a portrait of Dante by Giotto, but that doesn’t add up to me. Why would an exiled politician be painted inside the Palazzo de Podesta?! From the Dante’s Library site at Duke:

In either case, the frescoes were completed long after Dante’s exile from Florence in 1301, a fact that has cast some doubt on whether or not the fresco would actually have been intended to represent the poet. An exiled traitor, it is questionable that he would be glorified in the Palazzo of the Podestà. We can also note dissimilarities between this representation of Dante and Boccaccio’s description of him in the Vita di Dante as a man with a dark complexion and a thick, curly beard. 

Let’s get back to a straight up head to head: Cimabue?

Or Giotto:

Vote in the comments!