The Adoration of the Magi

The three kings kneel to adore the Christ child in a clear, bright, archaizing style that deliberately recalls the early Italian and German Renaissance. Friedrich Overbeck was a leader of the Nazarenes, young German painters who, seeking to restore sincere Christian feeling to art, lived almost monastically in Rome and revived the pure outlines and devout spirit of painters before Raphael. Now in Hamburg, his Adoration of the Magi embodies their program - reverent, linear, and earnest, a conscious turning-back from worldly bravura toward the simple piety of an earlier age.