Adoration of the Magi

By the early 1480s the scholars around Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence were busy arguing that the wisdom of the ancient pagan philosophers had quietly prepared the way for Christianity. Botticelli sets the newborn Christ not in the usual wooden stable but among the cracked columns and brickwork of a ruined classical building. The old order is literally falling down while the new faith begins in its shadow. Kings and their retinues kneel in careful rows, each bowed head and open hand arranged to read as devotion. He painted this in tempera on a poplar panel around 1482, in the same years he was at work on the mythologies that made his name.