Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession 1853 - 1855

Frederic Leighton painted *Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession* in the 1850s. Leighton situates us in Renaissance Florence, where the artist Cimabue’s painting of the Virgin Mary is paraded through the streets to the church of Santa Maria Novella. Painted during the Victorian era, a time marked by Britain’s colonial expansion and industrial progress, Leighton creates not just a historical scene but an idealized, almost theatrical vision of the past. The varied crowd is carefully constructed, depicting men, women, and children from diverse social classes. Leighton invites the viewer to engage with a romanticized past. It presents a harmonious vision of society, while eliding the social stratifications of the time. The gaze is directed not merely at the spectacle of the procession but towards the emotional and social theater it represents, asking us to reflect on the narratives we construct about our collective past and its impact on the present.