Adoration of the Magi

Hieronymus Bosch died in 1516, and the appetite for his work only grew after that, above all in Spain. Around 1560 the Spanish humanist Felipe de Guevara complained that copies and imitations were everywhere, many of them signed with Bosch's name and smoked over a fire so the panel would pass for old. This picture comes out of that trade. It is a straight copy of the central scene of Bosch's Adoration triptych, the one now in the Prado in Madrid, and was most likely painted in an Antwerp workshop in the middle decades of the 16th century. Whoever made it kept the things that make the original strange: the stable knocked together from planks and thatch, the onlookers crowding its doorway behind the kneeling kings, a man sprawled across the roof to get a better view. Berlin acquired the panel in 1837. It is catalogued there as a copy after Bosch.