Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna, originally called Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, is an oil painting by English artist Frederic Leighton. Measuring more than two metres tall and more than five metres wide, the canvas was painted by Leighton from 1853 to 1855 in Rome as his first major work. Since 1988 it has been displayed in the National Gallery, London, on long-term loan from the Royal Collection, where it has been previously hung prominently, high above the main vestibule, directly beyond the entrance to the gallery. The painting was an immediate success for Leighton when he presented it at the 1855 summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London where it received near-universal acclaim. Queen Victoria purchased it on the first day of the exhibition for 600 guineas. The National Gallery notes Victoria's diary entry about the painting: "There was a very big picture by a man called Leighton. It is a beautiful painting, quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright and full of light. Albert was enchanted with it—so much so that he made me buy it." The English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote that the work proved Leighton's "great power of rich arrangement." His brother, the art critic and writer William Rossetti, was not as enchanted: "His picture has largeness, but not greatness; style, but not intensity; design rather than thought; arrangement rather than conception: it is individual, not specially original."