Mythologies of Artistic Biography: How the Artist Became

Abstract

The painting which stole the spotlight at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 and gave the artist his first major success was Frederic Leighton's Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence, currently on display at the Royal Collection in the exhibition, Victoria and Albert: Art and Love. Taking as its subject, the scene described in Giorgio Vasari's sixteenth-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects – in which a Madonna painting by Cimabue, the first of Vasari's great Renaissance artists, is borne aloft to the church of Santa Maria Novella ‘with great rejoicing and blowing of trumpets’ – Leighton's picture gave expression to a particular nineteenth-century interest not just in Vasari, but in the mode itself of artistic biography. For this is a painting about the special status of the artist in society, an image that gives visual form not simply to Vasari's story of Cimabue's Madonna, but to tropes about public esteem and splendid patronage, rehearsed in narratives about the life and work of artists since Vasari. As Hilary Fraser has noted, the picture is ‘strikingly metafictional’, it is a ‘painting about painting’. The fact that the Cimabue Madonna, faithfully reproduced by Leighton, and still extant in the Uffizi, turned out to be a Duccio, hardly matters. What is important is what Leighton saw in Vasari's anecdote: the chance to say something about the meaning and worth of his own activity in the present, by restaging the honours paid to his predecessors. Queen Victoria certainly saw something in the picture because she bought it on the first day of the exhibition.1