ABSTRACT
Leighton’s Vasarian house and work were symptomatic of a phenomenon described by Allen Staley as “a renaissance of the Renaissance,”5 an unprecedented celebration of Renaissance art and culture at a moment in Victorian cultural history when British art itself seemed to be experiencing a rebirth like that which took place in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italy. This new confidence in modern art was often expressed in forms that refer either generally or specifically to Renaissance models. The Albert Memorial is a good example of the heightened presence of Renaissance Italy in Victorian Britain as the touchstone of art. Flanked by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Raphael sits enthroned in the center of the podium of the painters on the east front, with Cimabue, Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Masaccio to the left of him, and the Venetian masters to the right. Raphael’s central placement as the undisputed embodiment of the classical achievement of the High Renaissance is a fitting tribute to the Prince Consort’s scholarly interest in the painter, but it is also a monument to mid-Victorian taste, and to the continuing power of the Vasarian canon.
