On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany, this week’s picture is the Flemish artist Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings. It was originally commissioned as an altarpiece for the Lady Chapel of St Adrian’s in Grammont by Joannes de Broeder, who became abbot in 1506, and who has been identified with the king kneeling at the feet of Gossaert’s serenely beautiful madonna and precociously pensive child. With his greying locks, cleft chin and couple of bumpy moles, visible despite the five o’clock shadow creeping around his jaw, this powerfully intent figure has the actuality and individuality of a portrait: a slice of real life, in an ideal world. The elaborate painting which he paid for, and in which his likeness is so vividly preserved, no longer graces the church for which it was originally designed. Nowadays it hangs in the National Gallery in London.

The story of the Wise Men bearing gifts from the east for the Christ child is told in just a few verses of spare, almost minimal narrative in the Gospel of St Matthew. Over the centuries those bare bones have been fleshed out by generations of Christian theologians, worshippers and storytellers. The historical identity of the Wise Men, or “Magi” as they are also known, remains uncertain. The Gospel writer may have had in mind the Zoroastrian priests of Persia, or scholars travelling through the Mediterranean and Near East, or Arab astrologers (a connection suggested by the star in the story). Traces of all of these ideas still cling to their myth, but by about the sixth century western Christianity had decided that the Magi were in fact kings. There were three of them – a detail extrapolated from the three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh in the biblical account...

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