L'Adoration des rois

Bramantino was as much an architect as a painter, and it shows in this small panel from around 1500. Under the paint, X-rays reveal a grid of lines he scored into the ground to build his perspective, following a method set out by the architect Leon Battista Alberti. The scene is the Adoration of the Kings, but Bramantino tells it his own way. His figures are so unusual that scholars still are not certain who some of them are meant to be, and he has added a grown man to the group, most likely John the Baptist, whose feast fell on the same day as the Epiphany. It was made small, for a private owner to keep at home rather than for any church. Even the gifts arrive in oversized containers, unlike anything in an ordinary nativity.