Adoration of the Magi

Botticelli left this one unfinished, and that is much of its power. He painted it in Florence around 1500, in his late fifties, in a city still shaken by the friar Savonarola, who had preached against worldly art and vanity and was burned in the main square in 1498. The graceful pagan spring of Botticelli's youth is gone here. The figures crowd toward the manger in an agitated, surging mass, closer to a vision than a ceremony, and whole areas are only sketched or left as bare panel. He seems to be reaching for the restless movement Leonardo was exploring in his own unfinished Adoration, made years earlier in the same city. Botticelli worked less and less in his final decade and died in 1510, by then largely out of fashion.