三王来朝

This is early Botticelli, painted around 1470 when he was a young man newly on his own in Florence. It is a tondo, a full circle, a shape that was fashionable in Florentine homes, and the round frame pushed him to rethink the usual scene. Instead of the three kings processing across the picture from one side, he gathers everyone into a semicircle around Mary and the child, so the crowd of worshippers curves inward and draws your eye toward the center with it. The kings kneel among the ruins of a classical building, its old stone giving way to a rough wooden shelter. That was a deliberate idea in Botticelli's day, the old pagan world falling into decay as the Christian one is born. The subject was a Medici favorite, and this may well have been painted to please that family.