
Adoration of the Magi
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The kings arrive with a retinue of horses, hounds and a leopard, every surface tooled in gold for one of Florence's richest families.
★ 8.0

The kings arrive with a retinue of horses, hounds and a leopard, every surface tooled in gold for one of Florence's richest families.

The three kings are Medici, and the young man in the saffron cloak at the right, looking straight out at us, is Botticelli.

Giotto had watched Halley's Comet in 1301 and painted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet, apparently the first artist to do it.

Bruegel gives the holy figures plain faces and surrounds them with gawkers and whisperers, which makes reverence hard to come by.

Overbeck and the Nazarenes lived almost as monks in Rome and painted deliberately like the Italians before Raphael. This is the program.