UNTIL quite recently, Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853–55) hung on a wall above the National Gallery main entrance stairs. Many visitors probably passed beneath without noticing it. The same holds true of the position that its creator Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–96) holds in the British art world of today: central to its history, yet largely ignored.
Nobody overlooked him in his 19th-century heyday. When was viewed at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1855, the described it as ‘the one picture in the collection that will mark this year… as an epoch in British Art’. Queen Victoria purchased it for 600
