The Adoration of the Magi

We know Bosch for hell, for the swarming nightmares of his later panels. This is Bosch before that, around 1475, painting a calm and orderly Adoration. The three kings kneel before the Virgin and Child in a stable, and the whole scene runs back into a deep tunnel of perspective, with a lot of gold leaf, which Bosch almost never used elsewhere. Two angels hold up a curtain behind the figures, like a stage cloth being drawn open. That may be a real memory of theatre. Bosch spent his life in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch, where religious plays were performed, and the staged feel of this panel seems to borrow from them. It is a small picture, under three feet tall. The strangeness that would later fill his work is not here yet, only the careful faces and the long, quiet recession into the distance.