Representing an episode of the passion of Christ, this small panel depicts Roman guards flagellating him with whips before sending him to his death. The thirteenth-century artist Cimabue, thought to have been Giotto’s master, envisioned a devotional painting intended to bring the viewer closer to Christ’s suffering. The structures in the background frame the center of the composition where the torture is taking place.
Although building on the tradition of Byzantine icons, Cimabue played a key role in the history of western art by investigating the possibilities of perspective and motion. With tiny, layered brushstrokes, Cimabue renders Christ and his tormentors in minute detail.
When Henry Clay Frick’s daughter Helen purchased this painting, in 1950, its authorship was debated. Fifty years later, the discovery of another Cimabue panel depicting the Virgin and Child, now at the National Gallery in London, dispelled any lingering doubts as to the author of the Frick panel. Technical examination has shown it to be part, with the Virgin and Child, of a larger complex by Cimabue that was probably made out of eight scenes and mounted as a diptych. Recently, a third panel—the Mocking of Christ—has been discovered in France. With so little of Cimabue’s work surviving, the new attribution is a major discovery that puts the artist’s remarkable talents into finer focus.
The Flagellation of Christ
The most celebrated Florentine artist of his generation, Cimabue (ca. 1240–1302) won acclaim for his achievements in naturalistic representation and emotional expression in monumental altarpieces, frescoes, and mosaics. In 1950 The Frick Collection acquired an extremely rare small-scale painting attributed to Cimabue, The Flagellation of Christ. Scholars immediately recognized the work’s beauty and importance but debated whether it was in fact a work by Cimabue or by his Sienese counterpart, Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1255–1319).
In 2000 another small painting by Cimabue, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels, was discovered in a private collection in Britain. Scholars attributed this previously unknown work to Cimabue based on stylistic comparisons to one of his celebrated altarpieces, the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Studies further revealed that The Virgin and Child Enthroned, now in the collection of the National Gallery, London, and the Frick Flagellation once formed part of the same larger work, possibly a small altarpiece, or a diptych or triptych used for prayer. At an unknown date, this work was cut apart, and its individual scenes entered the art market as independent panels.
Acquired at the end of the 19th century by M. Rolla; passed on to G. Rolla before being sold. E. Moratilla, Paris. Knoedler. Frick, 1950.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: French, Italian and Spanish. Volume II. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
