Adoration of the Magi

The three kings of the Gospel narrative pay homage to the newborn Christ in a small panel that is among the earliest surviving works of Jan van Scorel. He is the artist who carried the Italian manner north: he studied in Rome, where he served for a time as keeper of the Vatican antiquities under the Dutch pope Adrian VI, travelled as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, and came home to Utrecht as a canon of the cathedral, bringing with him a classical vocabulary of form and ornament that reshaped Netherlandish painting in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The panel itself is painted on fir, a wood rare in the Low Countries and one the artist may have bought on his journey across the Alps — a small clue to the years of travel out of which his reputation grew. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.