Adoración de los Reyes Magos

The young king kneeling in the middle, with long fair curls, is Dürer himself. He painted this in 1504, back home in Nuremberg between his two trips to Italy, and you can see Italy in it, in the clean perspective and the warm Venetian colour, married to a northern love of detail so sharp you could count the stones and beetles. It was made for Frederick the Wise of Saxony, for his chapel in the castle church at Wittenberg. That location turned out to matter. In 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on a door of that same church, and this panel hung just inside, a few steps away, as the Reformation began. Follow the three kings and their gifts back into the picture, past the crumbling brick arch, and the landscape falls away into blue distance and water.