Adoration of the Magi (Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi)

While some are critical of the discordances this history has produced,[4] for John Walker, the second director of the National Gallery of Art, the result was among the greatest Florentine paintings in the world.

[9] A number of townsfolk have come out through a gateway in the walls, and are looking and pointing, in one case kneeling in prayer, but all looking in a different direction from the final location of the main figures.

The peacock's feet clearly grasp the end of a beam from the stable roof, but the bird is far too large compared to the figures and animals below him in the middle ground.

Who the nearly naked youths standing on the ruins are supposed to represent has puzzled art historians,[13] but their compositional function seems clearly to be to suggest a grander scale for the building than the procession through the arch would do.

At some point, perhaps upon Angelico's death in 1455, the unfinished work appears to have passed to the workshop of Filippo Lippi, the other main Florentine painter of the period.

[18] Together with the dog on the grass at the bottom of the painting, they were perhaps added by Benozzo Gozzoli around the time he was working on the famous fresco cycle of the Magi Chapel in the Medici Palace in 1459–61.

The chapel frescos also centre on elaborate processions of the Magi, and include several birds, and feathers, one of which is a goshawk, and another a peacock in a very similar pose to the one in the tondo.

It was in one of the ground floor "grand rooms" that also contained the three large paintings of The Battle of San Romano that are the best known works of Paolo Uccello, and are now divided between London, Paris and Florence.

It was given a larger value than these, or any other painting in the palace:[20] A large tondo with a gilt frame depicting our Lady and our Lord and the Magi who come to make an offering, from the hand of fra'Giovanni: f.

[21]From at least the late 16th century it belonged to the Florentine Guicciardini family, but it was sold in July 1810 to Chevalier François-Honoré Dubois, chief of police in Florence during the Napoleonic occupation, described as by Botticelli.

[23] A high quality Florentine tondo featuring the Magi would be suspected of originating with a Medici commission even without the evidence of the inventory, as the family had a very particular interest in both the subject and the form.

The tondo shape for large paintings may itself have been a Medici innovation, possibly representing the gold ring with a diamond that became used as a device by the family from the 1440s.

[25] The shape probably represents an inflation of the far smaller painted desco da parto or "birthing-tray", a decorated wooden tray, round or twelve-sided, that was traditionally presented by a Florentine husband to his wife after childbirth, and then used for serving refreshments to her visitors as she lay in state for a period of days after.

The same 1492 inventory that probably records the tondo shows that Lorenzo de' Medici kept the desco da parto presented on his own birth in 1449 hanging on his bedroom wall until his death.

[27] A Botticelli Magi tondo in the National Gallery, London of around 1470–75 has a comparable screen of ruined antique buildings running behind the main figures (as well as a peacock).

[28] A number of aspects of the arrangement of the figures and the general composition are probably borrowed from a Magi scene of about 1370–71 by Jacopo di Cione that was then part of his large altarpiece at the nearby church (now destroyed) of San Pier Maggiore.

[30] More general meanings that were attached to objects in the painting include the pomegranate held by the Christ child, whose many seeds were regarded as symbolizing the souls in the care of the church.

It also contained a colossal statue, that of Constantine, whose head, hand, foot, and other bits are now in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill.