The Adoration of the Magi

Jan van Scorel's Adoration of the Magi represents the Utrecht master's treatment of the most elaborate narrative subject in the Christmas cycle, allowing him to deploy his Italian-influenced compositional skills in depicting the pageant of exotic visitors and their retinues. Van Scorel's direct experience of Italian art during his extended travels, including his extraordinary period in Rome as curator of the Belvedere antiquities under Pope Adrian VI, gave him access to compositional models unavailable to painters who knew Italy only through prints. His Adoration integrates this Italianate spatial organization with the Flemish tradition's attention to landscape and figure detail.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.