Stop and Look – The Adoration of the Magi by Andrea Mantegna (1460)

Last winter, in the Christmas spirit, I chose to write about a picture of the Three Kings adoring the Christ Child by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. This year, again thinking of the feast of the Epiphany, I suggest we look at The Adoration of the Magi, another Christmas-tide image, by an Italian artist whose work Dürer knew and admired.

Andrea Mantegna, who was born in the northern city of Padua, not far from Venice, has much in common with Dürer. He is a muscular, highly intellectual artist with a dominating concern for the science that underpins the visual world: the mathematics of architecture, the proportions of the human body. Both artists draw with a tightness and angularity that betrays these intellectual disciplines. 

But while this Adoration has many points in common with Dürer’s work, it’s an image that couldn’t be more different from the all-embracing landscape with whole-length figures that Dürer painted in his own Adoration of the Magi. For a start, this is a smaller picture, and it’s not in oil – a very modern medium at the time –  but in distemper. That’s to say, pigments bound with animal glue which was not uncommon then, and not on a wooden panel but on the light-weight support of fine linen. Most pictures created with these means have not surprisingly been lost with the passage of time.

This example has the feel of an intimate work, intended perhaps for transporting from one place to another as the owner travelled about. It’s been suggested that it may have belonged to Isabella d’Este, the beautiful daughter of the Duke of Ferrara who married Francesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua.  The link is that Isabella and her brother Alfonso both seem to have been collectors of Oriental porcelain, like the bowl in the hands of the elderly Magus in the foreground here.

It’s a bit misleading to speak of the “foreground” of this picture. If ever a subject was crammed into a tight space with no foreground or background, it’s this. No expansive landscape here. But what Mantegna loses by way of space he compensates for in the intensity of the individual personalities he brings together. The Three Kings, or Magi, are grouped on the right, their gazes fixed on the infant blessing them as he sits in his white swaddling on his Mother’s knee. Behind Mary who watches her son with loving intensity, is her husband Joseph, who seems to be a little in awe of the Magi, and indeed of the whole astonishing event. 

The heads are brilliantly lit, against a plain black background that allows the eye no distraction from the figures themselves. Mantegna’s interest in human physiognomy is obvious – you could say it’s his real subject here. In the constricted space of his modest-sized picture he creates an interplay of personalities, partly in terms of the physical and racial types (part of the point of the legend of the Three Kings is that they represented the whole of humanity), partly with the carefully studied costumes: the beautifully delineated folds of turbans, the textures of fabrics, including exotic dark animal skins in the head-dress of the African King Balthasar and the cape of the elderly Caspar.

Then there are the gifts themselves: an exquisite bowl of fine porcelain, a chalice of polished agate with its beautiful graining, and an ovoid vessel of scarlet jasper mounted in silver. This scarlet shape forms a central focus for the reds in the picture, from Joseph’s simple cap on the extreme left to Balthasar’s ornate turban balancing it on the right.

Every element in the composition has a carefully calculated position in a subtle network of interlocking lines, all held in place by the surrounding rectangle of the picture frame. It would make a densely rewarding image on a Christmas card, wouldn’t it?

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.