Stop and Look – Albrecht Dürer: The Adoration of the Magi 1504
The Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th) comes immediately after Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The two feasts commemorate the revelation of the infant Christ as the Saviour of the World to groups of people who mythologically symbolise the whole of humanity.
The shepherds, summoned by angels from the fields close to Bethlehem, represent the local, i.e., the Jewish, population, and also the poor and underprivileged. The Gospel of St Matthew tells the story of how “wise men from the East” followed a star to Bethlehem where Jesus had just been born. (Some people think it was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn like the phenomenon we saw in our own skies the other week. But how that star managed to “stop and stay” over Bethlehem is unclear).
The Wise Men, or Magi, represent those other than the Jews: gentiles, foreigners and sophisticates from different cultures.
At this time, it is appropriate to remember the huge importance the subject of The Adoration of the Christ Child by the Magi has had for European artists over the centuries. But what the Bible tells us is significantly different from what artists have chosen to depict. This is partly because many myths and embroidering’s of the tale have grown up over the centuries. Matthew makes no mention of how many “wise men” there were and doesn’t give their names. He specifies their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh though, and deeply symbolic they are: gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, and myrrh for the embalming of a corpse.
The names of the Wise Men, or “Kings” as they came to be understood, were also invented: Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior – names that could have come from Arabian Nights. Only in the Renaissance were they symbolically differentiated by age and race.
They made a subject worthy of the German artist Albrecht Dürer, one of the great minds of the European Renaissance, with a consuming passion for knowledge about all aspects of the visual world and human experience. He studied avidly the endless varieties of human physique and physiognomy and was a master of portraits in all media – paint, chalk, pen, ink and engraving.
He was among the most learned, as well technically accomplished, artists of a period that abounded in accomplished painters and draughtsmen. He had spent some time in Italy in the 1490s, and was about to return there, so was familiar with the great achievements of the Venetians and Florentines of the early Renaissance. He was employed to produce spectacular settings for royal pageants and processions, knew a lot about fabrics and their design, and could render their sumptuousness in paint.
In his picture of the three Kings, the old man Caspar in the foreground being greeted so happily by the Christ Child, wears a sumptuous crimson brocaded robe. Behind him stands Melchior, middle-aged, in green satin with a red-and-gold border. This figure, with his long golden hair, placed in the centre of the composition, looks very like Dürer himself, whose appearance we know from several self-portraits. The third visitor, to his right, in black and gold with crimson hose and a red, long-plumed cap, is the young Balthasar.
Like the narrative itself, many features of its setting had become fixed by the late fifteenth century. The traditional scene of the Nativity, the stable, is no mere shed: it’s become a tumble-down classical building symbolic of the outdated religions of the ancient world, supplanted by Christianity. We might note that while the stone temple or palace is crumbling, Dürer’s cattle-shed itself is freshly constructed of sturdy new planks: honest, functional, but necessarily plain and unpretentious.
Dürer was also an early student of landscape, executing minutely observed records of everything from skies to clumps of grass, sometimes using the then very experimental medium of watercolour. His richly detailed Adoration includes, in the background, a striking landscape, with a steep mountainside and a blue sky with fleecy clouds. Here is the great Renaissance polymath in all his splendour, tackling one of the enduring themes of Christianity, with typical wisdom and panache.