The Adoration of the Magi

This drawing of the Adoration of the Magi closely recalls treatments of the theme by painter and tapestry designer Bernard van Orley, in particular his picture from the early 1520s in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which features the same broken column and very similarly posed principal figures, largely in reverse. As scholars have long noted, Van Orley derived the figures in the Philadelphia painting from the Adoration scene in the Scuola Nuova tapestries in the Vatican; he probably had access to the preparatory drawings for this cycle, which was woven in Brussels between 1520 and 1530. They reappear in the present drawing as filtered through Van Orley’s painting (or another version or copy of it) and with various other modifications. Here, for example, the Christ Child’s outstretched arms reach not for the head of the bowing magus but for the contents of the chest presented to him.

The drawing could well be a design for an unrealized or an as-yet unidentified tapestry. This would explain the orientation of the composition, which would have been reversed (and therefore returned to that of the Van Orley painting) when woven. The multitude of subsidiary figures and episodic detail in the extensive background—all in stark contrast to the pared down composition of a tapestry possibly woven after Van Orley’s designs in the 1530s (see 14.40.706)—would have made it a highly ambitious undertaking.