Adoration des mages

By the 1490s Andrea Mantegna had spent decades as court painter to the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, and for this small Adoration he worked not on a wooden panel but on fine linen, in distemper, pigment bound with glue rather than oil. That gives the surface a soft, matte finish close to a drawing, and it is also why the paint sits so fragile today. He pushed the figures right up to us in a tight half-length crowd, the three kings pressing around the child with no landscape and no gilded sky behind them. Their gifts arrive in costly foreign vessels, among them a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain cup, the kind of exotic object a Renaissance court prized and rarely saw in the flesh.