Adoration of the Magi

Antwerp in the 1520s was the busiest port in northern Europe, and its painters worked like an industry, turning out altarpieces to be crated up and sold abroad. The Adoration of the Magi was one of the best sellers, because three kings meant fine clothes, gold vessels and a chance to show off, and this arch-topped panel is one of those export pieces.

For a long time nobody knew the painter's name. He was called the Master of 1518, after a date inscribed on the painted wings of a carved altarpiece of the life of the Virgin in St Mary's church in Lübeck, far up the Baltic, which is itself a measure of how far this trade reached. Since the 1960s he has generally been identified with Jan van Dornicke, a painter from Tournai working in Antwerp, and the Brera lists the panel under that name, though the identification has never been proved.

The ruined architecture the Magi kneel in, half Gothic and half Roman, was the workshop's standard setting.