Adoration of the Magi

A Rubens altarpiece made for nuns in Louvain now stands behind the altar of King's College Chapel in Cambridge. Getting it there meant lowering a floor, and the change still divides people.

The story behind the painting

Rubens painted this Adoration of the Magi as an altarpiece for the chapel of the Convent of the White Nuns in Louvain, then in the Spanish Netherlands and now in Belgium. The dates differ: the article opens with 1633 to 1634 and later gives 1632 to 1633, while Wikidata places it in the 1610s. A preparatory oil sketch is in the Wallace Collection in London, and Hans Witdoeck engraved the composition in 1638. After convents were suppressed in 1780 the painting was sold, reached the Marquess of Lansdowne in 1788 and then the Grosvenor family in 1806.

What to look for

It is a tall work, oil on panel, about 328 by 247 cm according to Wikidata, while the Corpus Rubenianum gives 3.28 by 2.49 metres. Its vertical shape is what an altarpiece needed, and the composition was made to be seen above an altar. Today it sits in a wooden triptych frame created for it, with a new harlequin grisaille, at the east end of the chapel. Standing in the long Gothic chapel, notice how the painting is placed low enough that it does not block the great stained glass windows behind it.

Meaning and intent

Made to stand over an altar where nuns prayed, the picture returned to that role three centuries later. In 1959 it was sold from the estate of the 2nd Duke of Westminster and bought by the property developer Alfred Ernest Allnatt, who two years later gave it to King's College. The college accepted what it called a munificent gift, meaning to show it in the chapel, possibly as an altarpiece. It first hung in the antechapel before the decision was made to rebuild the east end around it.

Legacy

To fit the painting, three steps up to the altar were removed and the floor lowered, and the oak panelling, communion rail and a reredos designed by Detmar Blow in 1906 were taken out. Critics condemned the loss of irreplaceable features, arguing it was all for appearances during the chapel's annual broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. The painting has stood there since 1968. In June 1974 it was vandalised, with the letters IRA, two feet high, scratched into its surface.