Adorazione dei Magi

Lorenzo Monaco painted this around 1420, and he was a Camaldolese monk, which is why the gold and the slender, swaying figures feel closer to the old Gothic world than to the solid new painting already appearing a few streets away in Florence. He was paid the very large sum of 182 florins for it, and he had three assistants at the panel. What he did not do was finish it entirely. Decades later, in the second half of the century, the painter Cosimo Rosselli came back and added the prophets and the Annunciation around the edges, so the surface you're looking at was built by two different hands a lifetime apart. Follow the three kings and their train and you can still read the earlier, lighter rhythm that Lorenzo set down first.