Adoration of the Magi

Around 1492 the young Albrecht Dürer, barely 21 and still years from fame, was making his way through Basel, then one of Europe's busiest printing towns. He had left Nuremberg to learn his craft, and in Basel that work meant designing woodcuts for the presses turning out illustrated books. This small panel of the three kings kneeling before the Christ child comes from exactly those years, and whether Dürer's own hand painted it has long been argued. The catalogue keeps his name on it, with caution, while scholars weigh how much is really his. Much of the argument turns on the figures, which resemble the woodblocks he is thought to have cut in the same city for an edition of the Roman comedies of Terence. Those unfinished blocks survive in the same Basel collection.