The Adoration of the Kings

The Adoration of the Kings shows the three Magi presenting their gifts to the infant Christ before a tumbledown stable, a crowd of onlookers pressing behind them. In typical fashion Pieter Bruegel the Elder rendered the biblical scene as a piece of Netherlandish life, filling it with plain, even rough figures rather than elegant courtiers, and giving the Virgin a plainness unusual in such subjects. Painted on oak in 1564, the picture belongs to the artist’s late years and shows how he could take one of the most familiar subjects in Christian art and make it strange, human, and observant.