The Adoration of the Magi: The Three Paintings on This Year’s Christmas Cards
Open one of this year’s Christmas cards from Australia Needs Fatima, and the first thing you see is the Christ Child with His Mother, and the Wise Men kneeling before Him. Behind them come their servants and their animals, and behind those runs the long road back to the East.
Italian masters painted this scene more than five hundred years ago, each in his own way, and three of their paintings are on the three cards in this year’s pack. One was made for a banker’s chapel in Florence. One came from a workshop in Venice. And one may be the painting the Medici valued above every other in their palace.
This is the story of those three paintings, and of the scene they all set out to show.
What does the Gospel tell us about the Wise Men?
Saint Matthew is the only Evangelist who tells their story. “When Jesus therefore was born in Bethlehem of Juda, in the days of king Herod, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem. Saying, Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to adore him” (Matthew 2:1–2).
The star went before them to Bethlehem, “until it came and stood over where the child was” (Matthew 2:9). Then comes the moment all three paintings show: “And entering into the house, they found the child with Mary his mother, and falling down they adored him; and opening their treasures, they offered him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11).
Saint Matthew does not say how many they were, nor that they were kings. Christians have counted three of them from their three gifts, and the Church’s liturgy for the Epiphany sings of them in the words of Psalm 71: “The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents: the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts” (Psalm 71:11).
Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira saw in them the Gentile nations, and all the wisdom of the ancient world, coming to pay homage to Christ. No one had sent them, and there were only three, yet in his words they “represented something in the plans of Providence.”
Everything else the Gospel leaves to the imagination: what the kings wore, who travelled with them, what the house in Bethlehem looked like. Each of the three paintings answers those questions differently.
A banker’s chapel in Florence
Gentile da Fabriano signed and dated his altarpiece in May 1423. It had been commissioned by the Florentine banker Palla Strozzi for his family’s chapel in the sacristy of the church of Santa Trinita, the chapel where the Strozzi buried their dead.
Strozzi paid 300 florins for it, about six times a skilled workman’s wages for a year. It is a large painting, three metres high, and Gentile was lavish with it. He covered it in metal leaf, and in places he raised the leaf from the surface, so that the spurs on a horseman’s boots and the hilt of a sword stand out in relief.
His kings wear the richest fashions of the day, and a long procession follows them, with horsemen and servants and a menagerie of monkeys, leopards, a lion, a dromedary and falcons. Across the top of the panel, under three arches, Gentile told the story of their travels in smaller scenes.
In the foreground, the kings are taking off their crowns. The eldest lies face down on the ground before the Christ Child, and the Child touches his balding head.
Below the main picture runs a predella of three small paintings: the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt and the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple, painted under blue skies in place of the gold backgrounds of older altarpieces. The Presentation panel in Florence today is a copy, and the original is in the Louvre.
The Uffizi Galleries, where the altarpiece hangs today, call it “the most important example of International Gothic painting in Italy.”
Why so much gold?
It would be easy to see all that splendour as a rich man showing off. But look at where the gold is going. The kings are taking the most precious things the world can offer and laying them at the feet of a Child, and the banker who paid for the picture had it set above an altar where the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered.
The kings gave the finest things their countries had. A painter who covers their robes and spurs in metal leaf is doing the same in his own craft, giving the best of his art to the Child they came to adore.
A Venetian panorama
The second card carries a Venetian Adoration of the Magi, painted between about 1445 and 1447. The State Museums in Berlin, which own it, credit it to Antonio Vivarini, who was born on Murano, the island in the Venetian lagoon famous for its glass, and to his brother-in-law, Giovanni d’Alemagna. Vivarini’s painting shows the influence of Gentile da Fabriano, the painter of the first card.
It is painted on poplar, a little over a metre high and 176 centimetres wide, and laid out as one broad view, with the far country fading into the distance in the manner of the illuminated manuscripts of the time. The kings come in rich robes with a large retinue, and Mary holds the Child on her lap.
Above them all, God the Father appears among angels blowing trumpets, with the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the city of Jerusalem rises in the upper left. The panel is worked with gilded reliefs, and it carries the words the angels sang over Bethlehem: Gloria in altissimis Deo, “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14).
The Web Gallery of Art counts it among “the finest Venetian International Gothic altarpieces.”
The painting the Medici may have valued most
The third card shows a round painting, a tondo, nearly a metre and a half across, painted on poplar. It was begun in the workshop of Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar and painter whom Pope John Paul II beatified in 1982 and named the patron of artists two years later.
The work stalled, and it was finished by another friar who painted, Fra Filippo Lippi, perhaps after Fra Angelico died in Rome in 1455. Most historians believe Lippi painted much of what we see today.
The procession winds around a hill, passes under an ancient arch and comes down to the stable, where the three kings kneel with their gifts before the Holy Family. Shepherds, servants and townsfolk crowd around them, and the Child holds a pomegranate in His hand.
Florentines of that time knew such processions well, because every five years their city re-enacted the coming of the Magi in a great parade.
When Lorenzo de’ Medici died in 1492, an inventory was made of the family’s palace in Florence. One entry, which survives in a copy made in 1512, records a round Adoration of the Magi by “fra Giovanni,” Fra Angelico’s name in religion, hanging in a ground-floor room beside Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. It was valued at 100 florins, more than any other painting in the palace.
Many scholars identify that entry with this painting. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which owns the tondo, calls the evidence slender, so we cannot be certain. If they are right, the Medici valued this picture above every other painting in their house.
A peacock on the stable roof
Look closely at the roof of the stable and you will find a peacock. It may have been added a little later, and it carried a meaning: the flesh of the peacock was believed never to decay, and so the bird stood for eternity and for the Resurrection.
Behind the stable stand ruined walls, with nearly naked boys standing among them. Painters of the time often set the Nativity among the ruins of a pagan building, after a legend that a Roman temple fell on the night Christ was born, and the National Gallery of Art suggests the ruins and the boys may refer to the ending of the pagan world.
The old world crumbles in the background, and in the foreground the kings kneel to the Child who would make all things new.
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“Let us enter; let us not be afraid”
Inside each card are the words of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, the Neapolitan bishop who founded the Redemptorists in 1732 and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871: “Let us enter; let us not be afraid.”
They come from the discourse he wrote for Christmas night, on the birth of Jesus Christ, among his meditations for the Novena of Christmas, which begins on 16th December. Speaking of the cave at Bethlehem, he wrote that “the cave is no longer horrible, but is become a paradise. Let us enter; let us not be afraid.”
Saint Alphonsus loved this mystery. He also wrote the words and music of the Italian carol “Tu scendi dalle stelle,” “You come down from the stars,” which Pope Benedict XVI recalled when he spoke about the saint in 2011.
The Wise Men did what his words ask. Saint Matthew says they entered the house and fell down before the Child: great men of the East, kneeling to a little Child, and not afraid to do it.
Our Lady’s promise on the back of the card
Turn any of the cards over and you will find Our Lady of Fatima, with the words she spoke to the three shepherd children on 13th July 1917: “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
The Wise Men “found the child with Mary his mother,” and so does everyone who opens one of these cards. She brought the Child into the world at Bethlehem, and at Fatima she came to lead the world back to Him. Her promise on the back of the card is a word of hope for every home that receives it.
What you can do this Christmas
- Send the cards to family and friends, especially to anyone you have not seen for a long time, and write a line of your own inside.
- Take a card to someone who will spend Christmas in a retirement home or in hospital.
- From 16th December, make the Novena of Christmas, the nine days before the feast for which Saint Alphonsus wrote his meditations.
- Set up a crib at home, and place the Wise Men a little way off, moving them closer each day until the Epiphany.
- Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, staying a little longer with the third, the Nativity.
- On the feast of the Epiphany, pray the Church’s own prayer for the day, below.
Prayer for the Epiphany
O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
References
[1] The Adoration of the Magi, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi (image) - National Gallery of Art
[2] Adoration of the Magi - Uffizi Galleries
[3] Adoration of the Magi (Gentile da Fabriano) - Wikipedia
[4] Adoration of the Magi, Gentile da Fabriano, ca. 1423 - The Christian Century
[5] Adoration of the Magi, Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
[6] Antonio Vivarini - Wikipedia
[7] Adoration of the Magi, Antonio Vivarini - Web Gallery of Art
[8] Adoration of the Magi (Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi) - Wikipedia
[12] General Audience of 30 March 2011: Saint Alphonsus Liguori - Benedict XVI
[13] The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Chapter 2 - Douay-Rheims Bible
[14] The Gospel According to Saint Luke, Chapter 2 - Douay-Rheims Bible
[15] Psalm 71 - Douay-Rheims Bible
[16] Reges Tharsis - Wikipedia
[17] Narrative of the Apparitions - Shrine of Fatima
Last updated: 5 November 2026 02:45