Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna

This large oil on canvas, painted by Frederic Leighton between 1853 and 1855 in Rome, was his first major work. It depicts a scene that the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari described from a thirteenth-century procession: a Madonna and Child carried from Cimabue's studio to the church of Santa Maria Novella. Cimabue leads the procession, wearing a laurel wreath, followed by several leading artistic figures of Florence, among them his pupil Giotto and the poet Dante, who leans against the wall on the right. A curious detail is that the Madonna in the centre is not by Cimabue at all but Duccio di Buoninsegna's Rucellai Madonna. Vasari's misattribution persisted until Franz Wickhoff corrected it in 1889. The painting was an immediate success at the Royal Academy in London in 1855, and Queen Victoria bought it on the first day of the exhibition. Today it belongs to the Royal Collection and is on long-term loan to the National Gallery in London.

Painter

Frederic Leighton

Date

1854

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

232 × 521 cm

Museum

Royal Collection

Movement

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Genre

history painting

Depicts

Dante Alighieri, Cimabue, Florence, procession, Rucellai Madonna

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