東方三賢王の礼拝

Three richly dressed kings crowd around a baby on a cold winter's day, but the faces around them are rough, odd, even grotesque, and soldiers press in from behind. Bruegel turned a sacred scene into a crowd of very human reactions.

The story behind the painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted this Adoration of the Kings in Brussels in 1564, signing and dating it lower right: BRVEGEL M.D.LXIIII. It was a tense time in the Spanish Netherlands, shortly before the Eighty Years' War broke out. The panel was probably made as an altarpiece, perhaps for Nicholas Jongelinck. It is one of very few Bruegel paintings in upright portrait format rather than his usual wide landscapes. Two other Adorations by him survive: an earlier one in tempera on canvas from around 1556, now in Brussels, and the Adoration of the Magi in the Snow of 1563, in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur.

What to look for

Mary sits in her blue cloak before a ruined stable, the naked Christ Child loosely wrapped in white on her lap. Old Caspar kneels in green and pink trimmed with ermine, offering a gold vessel full of coins; the gold on his robe shows a star, a centaur, a man with a snake and a slug. Melchior bows in red and blue with lidded frankincense. Balthazar stands to the right in a white robe and pointed red boots, his myrrh held in a golden ship built around a nautilus shell. Behind Joseph, one man wears spectacles, and armed soldiers with a crossbow and polearms crowd in. A donkey eats straw in the shadows.

Meaning and intent

This is the first Bruegel painting made almost entirely of large figures, a grouping borrowed from Italian painters like Parmigianino. But he used it differently. Instead of ideal beauty, he gives each face its own distinct, sometimes grotesque expression, recording the range of human reactions to the sacred event. The three kings stand for the three ages of man and the three continents then known. Unusually, soldiers fill the scene, perhaps echoing the political situation in the Netherlands, and the soldiers, the cross-shaped crossbow and the child's shroud may foreshadow the Crucifixion. Mary alone is shown naturally. The crowded composition, seen from slightly above, feels claustrophobic.

Legacy

The design draws chiefly on a Hieronymus Bosch Adoration triptych now in the Prado, and in part on Jan Gossaert's Adoration in the National Gallery. The technique is masterly yet fast: brushstrokes of the priming and the underdrawing still show through the paint. The blue sky has faded to a dull grey. Archduke Ernest of Austria bought the panel in 1594, and it entered the Habsburg imperial collection. Later it passed to a private collector. In 1920 the National Gallery in London bought it, with support from the Art Fund and the shipbroker Arthur Serena, and it remains there today.