Holkham is one of the great neo-Palladian houses of England and hosts the art collection of the Earls of Leicester. Thomas Coke, the First Earl of Leicester, was a lavish and discriminating collector who spent six years on a Grand Tour of Europe in the early eighteenth century. Of the hundreds of items brought back to Holkham, perhaps the most celebrated is Sangallo’s copy of Michelangelo’s ‘Battle of Cascina’, the only visual record of this great, lost painting.