The Adoration of the Kings

Nobody knows where this altarpiece stood, who paid for it, or exactly when Vincenzo Foppa painted it, perhaps around 1500. Its design reaches back to the Adoration that Gentile da Fabriano made in 1423 for the Strozzi chapel in Florence, or to an earlier version by Gentile then on view in Brescia, Foppa's home town. So the kings arrive in an older kind of splendour. Their crowns, collars and gifts are raised in pastiglia, a moulded paste, and covered with burnished gold. The stable is a crumbling classical temple, perhaps standing for the pagan religion that Christianity replaced. In the retinue two men carry falcons, and a young page on a grey horse has pushed his feet into the stirrup leathers because he cannot reach the stirrups. The Virgin's cloak was once a brighter blue, before its top layer of ultramarine was lost.