The Adoration of the Kings is a small oil painting on panel of c. 1500 by the Italian Renaissance painter and architect Bramantino in the National Gallery, London.

[1] In it the Holy Family and the Magi are, unusually, joined by an adult John the Baptist, whose Baptism of Christ was celebrated on the same day as Epiphany in the liturgical calendar.

Some writers have suggested that the pointing figure carrying a rod to the viewer's right of the Virgin is him, but his age and appearance are unlike the conventional Josephs of the period, and much closer to that of John the Baptist.

An earlier Adoration of the Christ Child by Bramantino (c. 1485), now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, contains an even more eclectic group of figures: several wingless angels playing instruments, three medieval saints, the Tiburtine Sibyl at far right, and at the far left a figure variously identified as the pagan god Apollo (favoured by the museum), the Emperor Augustus or the poet Virgil.

The sibyl, Augustus and Virgil can all be related to medieval legends concerning prophecies of the coming of Christ; an ageing Apollo, if he is the figure, appears resigned to the new dispensation.

[13] Cleaning and restoration, plus technical examination, in the early 1990s revealed the full extent of the elaborate straight lines made under the paint as a framework for the perspective scheme.

These are in ink and scratched into the gesso base layer; some can just be seen by the naked eye, while others are clear in the unpainted edges of the poplar panel, when the frame is removed.

[20] The history of the painting is unknown until 1862, when it was bought from the Manfrin Collection in Venice by Sir Austen Layard,[21] the excavator of Nineveh and other sites in the Near East in the 1840s and early 1850s.

Layard had become wealthy from his best-selling accounts of his excavations, and embarked on a political career that included a number of ministerial positions, spending much of his time in Venice, where he built up a notable collection of paintings.