Adoration of the Magi

Botticelli painted an Adoration of the Magi in the 1470s that became a textbook case in art history — famous for depicting the Medici family as the Three Wise Men. But the version you’ll see at the National Art Museum of China is a late work, painted around 1500, after Florence had just lived through the expulsion of the Medici and the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the monk Savonarola. Same painter, same subject, two different eras — and the shift in style amounts to a spiritual earthquake. The painting now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery.

The Bible records that at Jesus’s birth, three Wise Men (Magi) from the East followed a star to find the infant in a manger, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Later Christian tradition elevated them to the status of Three Kings, representing three ages (old, middle, young) and three races — the symbolic idea that all of humanity comes to worship Christ. This subject was enormously popular in Renaissance Florence because the city had an elite brotherhood called the Compagnia dei Magi (Company of the Magi), whose members included the Medici family and their inner circle.

In the most famous 1475 version, the three Magi kneeling before the infant Jesus were: Cosimo de’ Medici (the late patriarch), his son Piero, and Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. Botticelli himself appears on the right side in a self-portrait. This wasn’t humility — it was a display of power. To paint yourself into a religious scene was to announce: when the divine event occurred, our family was there. This practice of “inserting the patron” was an openly understood convention in Florence; patrons and painters were both complicit.

The late version on display (c. 1500) has a completely different spirit. In 1494, the Medici were expelled from Florence; the monk Girolamo Savonarola began preaching the Last Judgment and burning “vanities” — mirrors, cosmetics, secular artworks. The entire city fell into religious fervor. Botticelli was deeply affected. According to records, he personally burned some of his earlier drawings of nude figures. His late works became compositionally denser, chromatically more tense, with figures carrying an air of apocalyptic weight — the lightness and beauty of Primavera had entirely vanished. The Adoration you are looking at was painted by a man who, after surviving dramatic upheaval, had begun to believe that judgment was coming.

Between 1494 and 1498, Savonarola established a theocracy in Florence, banning gambling, mirrors, and luxurious clothing, and igniting the “Bonfire of the Vanities” in the main square — burning artworks and luxury goods. He organized young men into a kind of “moral police” to patrol the streets and denounce their neighbors. In 1498, the Pope excommunicated him; he was then arrested, tortured, hanged, and his body burned in the same square where he had lit his own bonfires. This history is the direct backdrop for the sudden stylistic transformation in Botticelli’s late work.

When Botticelli died in 1510, he was almost entirely forgotten by his contemporaries. From the 16th century to the 19th, his name disappeared from the mainstream narrative of art history. It was the 19th-century English Pre-Raphaelite painters — especially John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — who “rediscovered” him and consecrated him as a symbol of purity and beauty. Today Primavera and The Birth of Venus are among the most globally recognized Renaissance works — but that reputation was built almost entirely four hundred years after his death.