Adoration of the Magi

Around 1600, collectors in Rome had a taste for paintings on stone, where the slab itself did part of the work. This Adoration of the Magi was painted in oil on a sheet of alabaster, somewhere between about 1605 and 1620, and the stone's own orange and cream veining becomes the glowing cloud across the upper half, with angels and God the Father laid over it. Below, the first king kneels before the Virgin and Child, while pages, soldiers and horses crowd in from the right. The picture has belonged to the Borghese since the 17th century, yet the early inventories give no painter, and Tempesta's name first appears in 1790. The signature surfaced even later. In 1971 the scholar Luciana Ferrara found it, partly worn away, on the small chest carried by a page in a plumed headdress.