Adorazione dei Magi

Giovanni Francesco Caroto was a Veronese painter who trained under Liberale da Verona and spent time in Milan, where he absorbed Leonardo's influence before returning to Verona. His Adoration of the Magi belongs to the type of large altarpiece Caroto produced for Veronese churches in the 1510s–20s, when he was the dominant painter in the city before the emergence of Paolo Veronese a generation later. The Adoration gave him the compositional challenge he relished — multiple figures of different ranks, cultures, and ages converging on the central sacred group.

Caroto's Leonardesque training is evident in the soft sfumato modelling of faces and the careful observation of varied character types among the Magi's retinue. The landscape background opens to a distant horizon with the atmospheric recession Leonardo had pioneered, while the foreground figures display the Veronese taste for elaborate costume detail.