The Adoration of the Magi

A bustling retinue of figures has accompanied the magi on their journey to witness the newborn king, Jesus. The painter emphasizes the anecdotal and the picturesque, like the colorful, multilayered draperies of the magi or the carved ornament on the triumphal arch. The latter is crumbling as trees and vegetation overwhelm it, a symbol of the new order that began with the coming of Christ.

The Milanese painter Cesare da Sesto had a peripatetic career throughout the Italian peninsula. He encountered Raphael in Rome, and was almost certainly a part of Leonardo da Vinci’s circle in Milan. He painted this work, his masterpiece, between 1516–19 for San Niccolò dei Gentiluomini in Messina, Sicily. When the Jesuit order was suppressed in 1799, it passed to the royal Bourbon collection in Naples.