Retable de Monforte

Hugo van der Goes painted this Adoration of the Kings around 1470 in Flanders, at the height of Bruges and Ghent's wealth from the cloth trade. What you see now is only the middle of the story. It was once the central panel of a larger altarpiece with hinged wings, and old copies tell us those wings showed the Nativity and the Circumcision. The wings are lost, and even this panel has been trimmed along the top, so the tall architecture the kings stand under is cut short. The painting takes its name from a convent in Monforte de Lemos in northern Spain, where it seems to have travelled in the early 16th century, far from where it was made. It reached Berlin at Christmas 1913. In 2023 the museum built a full reconstruction of the missing upper section for an exhibition, so visitors could finally see how much of the scene had been sliced away.