The ''Adoration of the Magi with Saint Helena'' is an oil painting on canvas of by

Palma Vecchio Palma Vecchio (c. 1480 – 30 July 1528), born Jacopo Palma, also known as Jacopo Negretti, was a Venetian painter of the Italian High Renaissance. He is called Palma Vecchio in English and Palma il Vecchio in Italian ("Palma the Elder") to di ...

in the

Pinacoteca di Brera The Pinacoteca di Brera ("Brera Art Gallery") is the main public gallery for paintings in Milan, Italy. It contains one of the foremost collections of Italian paintings from the 13th to the 20th century, an outgrowth of the cultural program of ...

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

Provenance

The work was commissioned for the Venetian church of Sant'Elena by Lady Orsa, the widow of Simone Malipiero. The canvas depicts the

Gospel Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words an ...

story of the adoration of the

Christ Child The Christ Child, also known as Divine Infant, Baby Jesus, Infant Jesus, the Divine Child, Child Jesus, the Holy Child, Santo Niño, and to some as Señor Noemi refers to Jesus Christ from his nativity to age 12. The four canonical gospels, a ...

by the

Magi Magi (; singular magus ; from Latin ''magus'', cf. fa, مغ ) were priests in Zoroastrianism and the earlier religions of the western Iranians. The earliest known use of the word ''magi'' is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius th ...

, with

Saint Helena Saint Helena () is a British overseas territory located in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is a remote volcanic tropical island west of the coast of south-western Africa, and east of Rio de Janeiro in South America. It is one of three constitu ...

, who can be identified by her attribute the

True Cross The True Cross is the cross upon which Jesus was said to have been crucified, particularly as an object of religious veneration. There are no early accounts that the apostles or early Christians preserved the physical cross themselves, althoug ...

, anachronistically shown as being present at the scene. The inclusion of the saint to whom the church was dedicated indicates that the work's original location was at the

high altar An altar is a table or platform for the presentation of religious offerings, for sacrifices, or for other ritualistic purposes. Altars are found at shrines, temples, churches, and other places of worship. They are used particularly in paganis ...

. The positioning of Helena's cross above the figures of the

Virgin and Child In art, a Madonna () is a representation of Mary, either alone or with her child Jesus. These images are central icons for both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. The word is (archaic). The Madonna and Child type is very prevalent in ...

is a clear prefiguration of Christ's fate. According to some critics the saint, prominently placed in the centre of the group of figures, is a representation of Lady Orsa who had commissioned the work. With the Napoleonic suppressions the canvas, like many other works, was removed from its original location and assigned to the

in Milan. According to some critics, the canvas is not entirely the work of Palma Vecchio but was completed by his pupils;

Giovanni Morelli Giovanni Morelli (25 February 1816 – 28 February 1891) was an Italian art critic and political figure. As an art historian, he developed the "Morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through s ...

wrote that Palma "had to leave the execution entirely to one of his assistants".

Description and style

Adorazione dei magi con sant'Elena particolare

The canvas depicts the classic characters of the

Adoration of the Magi The Adoration of the Magi or Adoration of the Kings is the name traditionally given to the subject in the Nativity of Jesus in art in which the three Magi, represented as kings, especially in the West, having found Jesus by following a star, ...

, with

Saint Joseph Joseph (; el, Ἰωσήφ, translit=Ioséph) was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who, according to the canonical Gospels, was married to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was the legal father of Jesus. The Gospels also name some brothers of ...

placed on the left of the canvas next to the Virgin and Child, and on the right the three Magi, one of them black and another an older man, accompanied by several soldiers and courtiers, who make up a procession winding through what appears to be a valley. In the distance a shepherd grazes his flock of sheep, while on the mountain on the opposite side is a castle, with blue mountains in the distance. A dilapidated classical building occupies the left-hand side of the composition. The uneven quality of the work suggests that it was completed by assistants, perhaps by

Giovanni Cariani Giovanni Cariani (c. 1490–1547), also known as Giovanni Busi or Il Cariani, was an Italian painter of the high-Renaissance, active in Venice and the Venetian mainland, including Bergamo, thought to be his native city. Overview His father, ...

References

Bibliography

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Adoration of the Magi with Saint Helena 1526 paintings Paintings by Palma Vecchio Paintings of Saint Helena Paintings in the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera Adoration of the Magi in art