The Adoration of the Magi

This long strip of a painting was never meant to be seen on its own. It was the predella, the low horizontal panel that ran along the bottom of a much larger altarpiece, and the altarpiece above it was by a different painter, Francesco Francia, in the church of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Bologna. The man who paid for the whole thing, Antonio Galeazzo Bentivoglio, son of the family that ran Bologna, had just come back from a journey to the Holy Land, which is why the Magi arrive as a knightly cortege with Bentivoglio faces among the riders. In 1809 the French requisitions took altarpiece and predella together to Milan. In 1816 the altarpiece went home to Bologna. The strip stayed here. Lorenzo Costa signed and dated it 1499, and the birth itself sits far back, almost lost behind the procession.