Adoration of the Kings

In 1753 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was in Würzburg, in southern Germany, covering the new palace of the prince-bishop with frescoes, among them one of the largest ceiling paintings ever made, over the great staircase. Fresco is painted into wet plaster, and the museum explains that when the season forced him to stop work on the walls, Tiepolo turned to canvas. This Adoration of the Magi, more than four metres tall, is one of those winter pictures, painted for the church of the Benedictine abbey at Münsterschwarzach nearby. He staged it like theatre, on the steps of a ruined temple, and framed it with large figures seen from behind, so the eye is led past their shoulders into the scene. When the abbey was dissolved in the secularisation of the early 1800s, the picture passed to the Bavarian state, which took it to Munich in 1804.