"Adoration of the Magi" by Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370–1427)

One of the wealthiest people in early Renaissance Florence commissioned Gentile de Fabriano to paint a magnificent altarpiece for his family's private chapel in an important church, Santa Trinita. The subject is the adoration of the Magi. The Magi are, by legend, the three kings who follow a star. That leads them to Christ, who's just been born, to whom they present gifts, and acknowledge Christ as king of kings by removing their own crowns and placing them before Christ. This was commissioned by a man who was incredibly wealthy, essentially the king of Florence, but Florence had no kings. Florence was a republic. The city of Florence was an independent political entity that was controlled by the wealthy merchants of the city and the guilds. The people of Florence were independent and proud members of a republic, but then you had this enormous accumulation of wealth, especially in the early 15th century. And this painting is a perfect way of showing off that wealth. The artist came from northern Italy, settled in Florence, in large part because there was money to be made there. There were patrons to be had there. And he was very handsomely paid for this altarpiece. We read one estimate that he was paid six times the annual wage of a skilled laborer for this one altarpiece. And his particular style is one of opulence. It's a bejeweled surface. There's gold. It's a perfect way for one of the leading families in Florence to show its importance. And the Strozzi family made their money primarily through banking, through handling gold. Although Paolo Strozzi, the patron for this particular painting, ignored the banking business and was much more interested in the arts and humanist learning. As we stand here in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, it's interesting to watch people look at this painting because people are picking out the many anecdotes that you can recognize, very much the way people would have when the painting was first made. This is a real crowd pleaser. Well, and there's fun things to see. We can make out the story of the Magi very clearly. It's really quite an inventive structure because you have a continuous landscape. But what we're seeing within it are a whole series of moments in time. It's a continuous narrative. In the upper left corner, we can see the three kings very distant just under the Star of Bethlehem over the sea. And we understand this from the story to be in the east. Which explains their attire. And then in the central arch, we see the three kings entering Jerusalem where King Herod asked the three Magi to report back where they find this king that King Herod has heard will threaten his reign. He would like to kill the child, but of course doesn't let on. And then in the rightmost upper corner, we see the three Magi entering the city of Bethlehem. And then presumably, the scene that is laid out before us is taking place there. And we get the sense of a crowd watching the three Magi approach Christ and Mary. The Christ child is playful. Look at those feet. And we see the three Magi in the process of bowing down before Christ. You can see that there are two attendants just behind Mary that are examining the first gift. And Joseph is standing just to Mary's left. The spurs are being removed from the youngest Magi's ankles. He's just gotten off his horse and he's about to approach Jesus. In fact, we see lots of pages. There is a sense of the courtliness of this scene. The spurs that we were talking about are really marvelous. They're actually built up to be three-dimensional. And this is done with plaster that is then gilded. But what it makes it look like is that it's a solid piece of gold, that this is jewelry attached to the image itself. You can see why that kind of treatment of the gold might appeal to as wealthy a patron as Paolo Strozzi. Now, the style of this painting is generally referred to as international Gothic. This is that last moment of the Gothic before the Renaissance will develop. Well, and that's because we don't see some of the things that we associate with the early Renaissance here. Unlike with Masaccio, who's painting just a few years after this, we don't see linear perspective. And in fact, we see a building up of the figures pressed into the foreground. The artist is avoiding the overlapping and obscuring of figures. At the same time, we see foreshortening, which helps to create an illusion of space with the horse on the right, for example, or the horse behind who's facing us. And, of course, diminishing scale. The figures get smaller as we're meant to read them going further back in space. The artist may have been influenced by somebody like Ambrosio Lorenzetti, who had created an extensive landscape in the city of Siena. The figures are still somewhat elongated, especially if you look at the Virgin Mary. Although the artist is using modeling to describe her knees and her thighs, if she were to stand up, I think we would see her as being tall and thin. Well, I think the emphasis here is on her elegance, her beauty, as opposed to her anatomical accuracy. Which would be a very Gothic thing and not a very Renaissance thing. The main panel is set between smaller scenes. Above, we have Christ's blessing, and then we have an Annunciation on either side. And then below, we have three predella scenes. In the predella panels, we see three scenes from Christ's childhood. On the left, the Nativity. In the center, the flight into Egypt. And on the right, the presentation in the temple. Let's take a close look at the Nativity. This has been called one of the first night scenes in art history. Lighting that comes from the moon and the stars and the angels and the Christ child himself. There's so many lovely details. Look, for instance, at the crown of peacocks worn by the figure on the right. Or the way in which the flowers in the frame push outward. To me, this painting is very much an accumulation of detail. There's a lot to look at, but it still resides in the late medieval Gothic tradition. And is a reminder of the tremendous wealth that would make the Florentine Renaissance possible.