Uchiwa Gallery

On the street behind Rouen Cathedral, Rue St. Romain, named after the city’s holy bishop, an interesting shop opens. Uchiwa Gallery, a Japanese shop with Japanese prints, books about them, albums by Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Japanese souvenirs. It is very appropriate that precisely in the birthplace of the Impressionism there is such a shop for Japanese prints, which inspired the vision of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist so much that it is considered a separate movement called “Japonisme”.

We are browsing between the objects, leafing through the books. The saleswoman offers to help us. We start talking about the selected objects.

“Why did you open a Japanese shop? Does it have anything to do with Japonisme?”

“I don’t think so. The owner, my friend, started this shop as a picture framer, and in the meantime she became interested in Japanese prints, so much so that they now form the profile of the shop.”

“Who is your audience, who buys Japanese prints here?”

“On the one hand, collectors from all over France. There are maybe only four such shops in the whole country, so anyone who is interested in them will come here again and again. On the other hand, a lot of young people. France is the homeland of comics, most comics are published here and in Belgium. And within that, manga, too. After Japan, most manga are published here. Manga is familiar to young people who read comics, and they quickly notice the Japanese prints that are related to them. After all, in Japan, manga and prints form a continuum. It is mainly the thirty- and forty-something generation who, having grown out of manga, can appreciate the original Japanese prints and come in and buy.”

“Do you also have Japanese visitors? What do they say? Do they buy?”

“Yes, Japanese tourists also come in, and they are very surprised, even touched. Japanese people do not know how popular Japanese prints are in the West, especially in France, and they are shocked that there is a special shop for them here. But they don’t buy. In Japan, classical prints don’t have such a large audience anymore. They still make modern paraphrases,” she points out a few, “but even that is rare, because the genre is too laborious, few people undertake it anymore.”

Salome’s dance

The façade of Rouen Cathedral in Normandy is familiar to most of us because Monet painted his famous series of thirty-three paintings of it between 1892 and 1894, showing how differently we see it at different times of the day and under different weather conditions, as if proving the basic principles of Impressionism through a scientific experiment.

The façade was built in the 13th century, starting with the left tower. The tympanum relief of its first completed St. John’s Gate was carved between 1270 and 1280. The relief depicts the death, that is, the heavenly birth of the two St. Johns. In the upper register, St. John the Evangelist, as described in the Golden Legend, descends into a tomb dug at the foot of an altar and then disappears into it amidst great brightness. In the lower register, Herod and his guests are seated at a banquet table, with Salome dancing beside them, then on the right, the executioner takes the head of Saint John the Baptist in prison, and finally, in the middle, Salome gives the head to her mother. As Matthew (14:6-11) and Mark (6:21-28) describe in unison:

“Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, for John had been saying to him: “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet. On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.” The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother.” (Mt 14,3-11)

Salome has entered the Gospels and the center of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist just as Pilate entered the Credo. The Gospels do not even mention her name – we will learn it from Flavius Josephus –, they only refer to her as “the daughter of Herodias”, just as she was only a tool in her mother’s hand. Herodias was the granddaughter of King Herod the Great, whom he gave in marriage to his son and heir on the throne, Herod II, her half-uncle. When, however, Herod II – who, for some reason, is referred to in the Gospels as “Philip” – falls out of favor with his father in 4 BC, Herodias abandons him and marries his younger brother, Herod Antipas, the new heir to the throne. Saint John the Baptist objected to this, and Herodias was determined to silence him forever.

However, the Rouen depiction is unusual for us. This is not how Salome’s dance lives in our cultural memory. We imagine Salome as a beautiful young girl who charms the old goat, Herod Antipas, with her graceful dance. As we see it in Renaissance paintings, such as Filippo Lippi’s or Benozzo Gozzoli’s Martyrdoms of Saint John:

However, the Rouen Salome is not like this, but rather a rubber-bodied acrobat woman, such as those who entertain the people of the inns in Chinese historical films.

This is probably the exact effect that this depiction was intended to produce. For medieval spectators, accustomed to couple and circle dances, the solitary dance basically meant the performances of acrobats and jugglers at fairs and inns.

But this is not the only reason. After all, the earliest depiction of Salome’s dance, in a Chartres Gospel from the early 9th century, we see not an acrobatic, but an “ordinary” dance. Something happened later, because from the 12th century onwards Salome is depicted almost everywhere as an acrobatic dancer.

The medieval church deeply condemned public entertainments – and indeed dance in general – just as it did Salome, and by linking them, the two mutually dishonored each other. As Saint John Chrysostom states in his homily on Matthew 14, Herod’s supper (PG 58:485-486):

Ὅπου γὰρ χοροί, ἐκεῖ καὶ δαίμονες· ὅπου δὲ πολλὴ κρότος, ἐκεῖ καὶ τὰ πονηρὰ πνεύματα· ὅπου δὲ αὐλοὶ καὶ κιθάραι, ἐκεῖ χοροὶ τῶν ἀκαθάρτων δαιμόνων.

“For where there is dancing, there are demons; where there is loud noise and clapping, there are evil spirits; where there are pipes and zithers, there is a choir of unclean demons.”

Καίτοιγε οὐ παρεῖσα τὴν τοῦ Ἡρῳδιάδος θυγατέρα, ἀλλ’ ὁ διάβολος, ὁ τότε δι’ ἐκείνης ὀρχούμενος, καὶ νῦν δι’ αὐτῶν τοὺς χοροὺς ἄγει.

“Even if the daughter of Herodias is not present, the devil who then danced in her person still leads the choirs through them.”

So the devil himself danced in the person of Salome. This is why she must be depicted in contorted, unnatural poses, as if possessed by a devil. As in many manuscripts, for example in this Amiens Missal from around 1323 (Royal Library of the Hague 78 D 40, fol. 108r):

or on this capital from the Abbey of St. George de Bascherville near Rouen, on which some crowned musicians are playing like in the scenes of the Apocalypse, but the woman dancing on her hands is considered by the literature to be Salome:

or on this extremely simplified and therefore very powerful depiction of the bronze gate of San Zeno in Verona:

Salome’s great era, however, came at the end of the 19th century. Oscar Wilde in literature, Gustave Moreau in painting, and Richard Strauss in music elevated her to a pedestal as the femme fatale, the archetype of the amoral woman who irresistibly seduces with her sensual dance. Which, after all, means just as much being possessed by the devil, only differently conceived and evaluated.

Gustave Moreau: Salome, two out of the three versions, 1876

Franz von Stuck: Salome, 1906, apparently the sister of Lilith, her contemporary

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th century, thousands of Salomes were born in pictures and writings. Each one was a femme fatale who seduces Herod and the viewer/reader with her sophisticatedly lustful dance. But there is a notable exception, Flaubert, who in his short story Herodias describes Salome’s dance in a different way:

“Next she began to whirl frantically around the table where Antipas the tetrarch was seated. He leaned towards the flying figure, and in a voice half choked with the voluptuous sighs of a mad desire, he sighed: “Come to me! Come!” But she whirled on, while the music of dulcimers swelled louder and the excited spectators roared their applause.

The tetrarch called again, louder than before: “Come to me! Come! Thou shalt have Capernaum, the plains of Tiberias! my citadels! yea, the half of my kingdom!”

Again the dancer paused; then, like a flash, she threw herself upon the palms of her hands, while her feet rose straight up into the air. In this bizarre pose she moved about upon the floor like a gigantic beetle; then stood motionless.

The nape of her neck formed a right angle with her vertebrae. The full silken skirts of pale hues that enveloped her limbs when she stood erect, now fell to her shoulders and surrounded her face like a rainbow. Her lips were tinted a deep crimson, her arched eyebrows were black as jet, her glowing eyes had an almost terrible radiance; and the tiny drops of perspiration on her forehead looked like dew upon white marble.”

Although we know from Flaubert’s notes that he had seen Moreau’s famous painting at the Salon of 1876, that was not the model of this Salome. It was rather the depiction seen by Flaubert, who was born and raised in Rouen, throughout his childhood and youth, and which must have been the archetype of Salome for him. The dancing girl at the St. John’s Gate of Rouen Cathedral.

Greek Saint Martin in the Pyrenees

We are tracing the memory of the Cathars in the French Pyrenees, south of Albi and Carcassonne. Castles ruled by the nobles who supported them, which were occupied from 1209 onwards by the crusaders sent by the French king under the leadership of Simon of Montfort. Small towns whose population was put to the sword or sent to the stake by the crusaders, in part or to the last man: “The Lord will know those that are his own.” Monasteries, mainly Cistercian ones, founded by local bishops in the second half of the 12th century, during the still bloodless phase of the conflict, to convert the heretics.

The Aude River that runs from the Pyrenees to the south of Carcassonne is flanked by a string of such monasteries: St-Hilaire, St-Polycarpe, Rieunette, Alet-les-Bains. Among them I discover on the map the name of Monastère de Cantauque, which is not mentioned in the historiography of the Cathars. I mark it for a visit.

From the road winding along the Aude between the hills of the Limoux wine region, a smaller road turns off into the valley of the tributary Baris, and then an even smaller one, a mere strip, into the valley of the stream Lauzy. Finally, at the beginning of a white gravel road branching off from this, you see a sign for the Orthodox monastery of Cantauque.

An Orthodox monastery in the French Pyrenees? As the building is slowly revealed from behind the trees, the distinctly Orthodox forms become more and more visible: the Ruthenian-style triple belfry with the Non-human-hand-made Icon of Christ, the Greek columned and domed porticus, the dominant brick-red color of the walls, the arched windows. All iconic historical forms. As if the designer wanted to create a building that is definitely modern, but at the same time suggesting that its elements have been pieced together over many centuries.

The inner wall of the porticus is covered by a Deesis fresco, a half-length Pantocrator Christ with the Virgin Mary on his right, and, surprisingly, with St. Martin of Tours on his left, in the usual place of St. John the Baptist. St. Martin has been the patron saint of his native Hungary as well as of his missionary land, France, for a thousand years. Below, an inscription: The monastery of the Mother of God and of St. Martin. Through the gate you can see into the courtyard, whose walls are decorated with large, colorful Orthodox frescoes.

When we ring the doorbell, a tall smiling monk comes out. He does not tell us his name and does not ask ours, only where we come from. “Hungary? We also had a Hungarian monk, Tamás, who recently went home.” “But you have another left”, I point to St. Martin above the gate. “Yes, yes. Although he was born in Szombathely” – he prounces the difficult name correctly – “but he is also the patron saint of Gaul. And since he lived before the schism, he is venerated as a saint by Catholics and Orthodox alike. That’s why we chose him as the patron saint of our monastery, because we wanted to create a community here that is completely French, completely Orthodox and completely international.”

He guides us to their chapel, the main entrance of which is separate from the monastery, at the back of the building, since it is used not only by the monks, but also by Orthodox believers from the wider region, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Greeks. “They come here from about a hundred kilometers distance, about two hundred persons, or three hundred on big holidays. At those times they stand outside the chapel. We have liturgy four times a day, at six in the morning, at noon, at six pm, and late in the evening. There are always some believers, if no one else, there are those who live in our ten guest rooms: now a few Ukrainian families, two Romanians, four French and one Georgian.”

“And you, how did you find us?” “We were visiting the monasteries here, we saw this one on the map, we thought we should not miss it. Only at the crossroads did we see that it was Orthodox.” “If you knew it beforehand, would you have avoided it?” “No, we would have come here first.” We all laugh.

On the wall above the entrance to the church, the life of St. Martin is painted in Orthodox icon style. I have never seen anything like it. In the centre, Martin himself as Bishop of Tours among the geese who betrayed him by gaggling when he hid in the goose-pen to escape his election as bishop. They still get their punishment for it every November 11. Above right, Martin’s baptism, above left, his sharing his mantle with the beggar, below left, his ordination as a monk, below right, his funeral. Some scenes from his standard Western iconography (e.g. Simone Martini’s St. Martin cycle in Assisi) are missing, because they are not really meaningful in an Orthodox context: his knighthood, the renunciation of arms, and his miraculous mass.

In 2016, in preparation for the 1800th anniversary of Saint Martin’s birth, I was asked by Europa Publisher to write a book on the European cult of him. In the course of a year, I visited his most important pilgrimage sites, and wrote the starting chapter about the inauguration of St. Martin’s footprint in Pannonhalma Abbey. Life, however, fell on me and I never finished the book. Recently I have been thinking of publishing the collected material here on the blog. An unexpected contribution to this is now this visit to the Orthodox monastery of St. Martin.

The chapel was decorated by a local monk-painter in a good style, with vivid colors and an original interpretation of the traditional Orthodox iconography. The painting was finished just a week ago, perhaps we are its first visitors. In the apse is the Virgin Mary, with Christ to come in her womb, below her St. John Chrysostom, St. Athanasius, and two Cappadocian church fathers, St. Basil and St. Gregory. And on the walls of the sanctuary are four church fathers who are a surprising choice in an Orthodox context: St. Martin, St. Hilarius of Poitiers and St. John Cassianus, who are usually associated with the Latin church (although, living before the schism, they are of course also Orthodox), and St. Isaac of Nineveh, who belonged to the Syriac Nestorian church in Persia in the 7th century, that is, after the separation of the Nestorian and Orthodox churches. Their presence indicates the desire of the monastery’s founders for ecumenism, for the linking of the Western Catholic and Eastern Syriac churches with the Orthodox mainstream.

A centuries-old Lebanese cedar stands in front of the church’s entrance. It was obviously not planted by the current monks. “Indeed not. The site of the present monastery was a nobleman’s manor. Before the French revolution, to plant a Lebanese cedar, or indeed to obtain cedar seedlings, required royal permission, and good connections with Versailles, where the seedlings came from. The local landowner seems to have had them. This cedar was planted sometime in the 1600s. It’s now coming into its own.”

We return to the courtyard of the monastery, which was once a sheepfold. In the centre is a pretty little well. The walls, now I clearly see, are decorated with scenes of the Creation, according to Orthodox and Venetian iconography. By Venetian iconography I mean that a current of Orthodox iconography – known to us from the 5th-century Cotton Genesis manuscript, used in designing the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica – represented the six days of the Creation by interpreting the standard final phrases closing each single day – and there was evening and there was morning, the second day, etc. – so that one more day was also created. The Venetian Creation mosaics, therefore, add to each day one more angel, representing that day, so that God resting on the sevenths day is surrounded by the angels of the six previous days. The Cantaque Creation is unusual in that God and the angels of the seven days are together before the first day of the Creation, but probably only because there was a large and significant wall area to depict them together.

The Egyptian monk-painter took particular delight in the detailing of the animals – fish, birds, quadrupeds – and in strong, striking colors. Around the edge of the second wall, the second Creation story starts with the planting of the Garden of Paradise. This was painted by a Romanian nun, in a more traditional but also more rigid and less creative style.

After looking around in the courtyard, we are invited to the monastery kitchen for a coffee. The coffee is brewed for us by a French pilgrim, and the cake is served by another pilgrim. The first is with her husband, the second with her daughter. They talk at length with our monk about the various Orthodox pilgrimage sites from Russia to the Caucasus and the Holy Land to Egypt, which they have obviously visited. When it gradually turns out that I have also been to these places, and even speake their languages, I get more and more looks of recognition. I almost become a honorary Orthodox.

And then I ask the question that has been on my mind for a long time: “Permettez-moi la question. You must have been born in a Catholic family. Comment avez-vous embrassé l’orthodoxie?” it is a nice phrase: how did you embrace Orthodoxy?

And then an amazing life story begins. With a very traditional Catholic family, where the father’s mother is a protestant from Alsace, but the father rejects this branch. Nevertheless, he still has the openness to enroll his son in the local Quranic school while living in Morocco: “you don’t have to believe in it, but if you live here, you have to learn what they do”. The boy speaks Arabic since childhood, does not believe in the Quran, but memorizes it, and goes to the Jesuits for religious instruction. In high school, like everyone else, he goes through crises of faith, then after graduation he finds his faith again and goes to the Holy Land. He works in a kibbutz, learns Hebrew, then is called to a priestly vocation, enters a Catholic monastery in Jerusalem, studies theology in Paris. Returning to Jerusalem, he studies in Jewish, Christian and Arab biblical and religious institutions, learns Russian, travels in the Holy Land, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. He feels himself ever closer to the Orthodox world. In 2002, he and his fellow like-minded monks return to France, where they found an Orthodox monastery in Cantauque. “The Catholic bishops have offered us a number of empty old monasteries, but the catch (he uses the phrase “poisoned gift’) is that they have to be maintained, which for a listed building costs an incredible amount of money.”

It is strange how much this region is intertwined with the Holy Land, from where the emblematic figures of the region came: the Cathars, the Templars, the Crusaders and now the Orthodox.

In France there does not seem to be a sharp dividing line between Catholic and Orthodox, as is shown by the many icons in Catholic churches. He is also invited to teach church history at the theology faculty in Toulouse. “I taught it for years until I felt more and more that Catholic church history was tendentious. It is taught as if Western Europe had been Catholic from the beginning. Yet in the beginning there was only one church, which was both Catholic, universal, and Orthodox, true to the faith. And it was the church of Rome that departed from this direction with the Carolingian Renaissance, becoming a Rome-centered provincial church. Look at it, the Orthodox church is still doing the same liturgy, singing the same hymns as it did two thousand years ago. And the Catholic church is constantly innovating. Even the recently re-authorized liturgy of Trent is not the original, it was an innovation in its day. Even the Gregorian chants can only be reconstructed. The truly great era of the Western church was when it had not yet departed from the original common faith. When they ask me what is the raison d’être of the Orthodox church in Catholic France, I answer: we are only bringing back what the Catholic Church originally was.”

We came to the Pyrenees to visit the region of great heresy – the title of Bruno Schulz’s biography –, and over coffee in the most lively monastery there, we discover that the heretics are in fact us.

The Magi from Paris

The Magi have been returning here to Río Wang year after year. First they descended from the bronze gates of the cathedral of Pisa, proving with early Christian and Orthodox depictions that in this world we can see them only through a glass, darkly, and cannot know anything about their true identity. Then we met them and other kings in Persia, understandably, since they came from there according to the earliest tradition. Later we saw how the uncrowned kings of Florence, the Medici, made the procession of the Three Kings Magi a city feast representing the power of their family, and how they immortalized it in a number of public works of art with the greatest artists, Fra Angelico, Botticelli or Leonardo, while preserving their most gorgeous representation for their private chapel in the Medici Palace. An this year they are coming from Paris.

In Prince Berry’s famous Beautiful Book of Hours, the masterpiece of Franco-Flemish Gothic manuscript art, painted by the Limbourg brothers between 1412 and 1416, the Feast of the Magi is illustrated by a double miniature on pages 51v-52r. The double full-page depiction marks the importance of the feast for the contemporary aristocracy. However, it is strange that the two miniatures painted on two separate sheets of parchment were only retrospectively inserted into the codex, in the Christmas section of the Marian lauds.

In the right-side picture we see a traditional Magi scene. The Magi arrive with a princely cortege before the Holy Family sitting in the barn. The oldest king is already kneeling before the King of Kings and giving Him his gift. In the background, on a green hill, shepherds graze their flocks and look up at the sky, where, under a heavenly lunette protruding from the earthly world, we see both the angels announcing the birth and the star of Bethlehem leading the Magi.

In the left-side picture, however, we see an unusual episode. The thre Magi and their entourage are coming from three winds towards the Gothic image column in the center. Such roadside image columns, which displayed statues or pictures of saints to the travelers and blessed their journey, lined the road from Paris to St. Denis. Around them, there is the wilderness, with animals usually symbolizing the wilderness of Bethlehem, like the lion and the bear (the latter is also the crest animal of Prince Berry). And in the background, a magnificent city is shining under a golden sun, apparently Jerusalem. However, it is unmistakably identified by the characteristic buildings of medieval Paris, Notre-Dame, Sainte-Chapelle and Louvre, which are also included in earlier miniatures of the codex.

The wilderness and the city refer to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and the three groups suggest that the three Magi met for the first time in Bethlehem. Yet in the Gospels it is stated that they came together to Jerusalem to inquire about the newborn king of the Jews, whose star they saw in the east.

However, the Limbourg brothers and their contemporaries read more than the Gospel of Matthew. The laconic information of the Gospels were readily imagined further by medieval people who preferred to make up colorful precedents histories to such brief, in medias res introductions like “His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit” or “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked”. Such was the Gospel of James (Protoevangelium Jacobi), which tells the story of Mary from her conception to that of Jesus. And such book was the Historia trium regum, the History of the Three Kings, that is, the Magi.

The book was written by the Carmelite monk Johannes de Hildesheim (1310-1375), author of several popular books, sometime after 1364, on commission by the Bishop of Münster, to provide a worthy spiritual and historical background for the relics of the Magi revered in Cologne. The relics had been collected by Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, in the Holy Land, from where she took them to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and later entrusted by Constantine to the custody of Bishop Eustorgius of Milan. From Milan they were sent to Cologne during the Investiture Controversy by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1164, after he conquered the city. In Cologne they attracted masses of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. The Historia trium regum, immediately translated into their mother tongues, German, French, Flemish and English, served as their “guidebook”.

The reliquiary of the Magi in the Cologne Cathedral, 1181-1230, work of Nicholas of Verdun, the masterpiece of Meuse jewelry

This book has gathered everything worth or not worth knowing about the Magi from a number of authentic or imaginative sources. It gives a detailed description of their countries, the “three Indies” (one of which appears to have been somewhere in Nubia), their customs and products, and how the three kings took notice of the Star of Bethlehem independently of each other, how rich entourage they composed, and how they miraculously arrived in only twelve days to Jerusalem. But when they were only two miles away from the city, a great dark cloud covered the sky and the star, “as Isaias says”, says Johannes: “Arise, shine, Jerusalem, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth, and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you, and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” (Is 60:1-3).

Palestrina: Surge, illuminare Jerusalem (Arise, shine, Jerusalem) (1575) – Tallis Scholars

And “under the cloud they got closer and closer to Jerusalem, and finally they met under the city, and sent ambassadors to each other and asked each other what they were looking for there. And when it turned out that they were all involved in the same matter, they became very happy and rode together, hugging and kissing each other, and their determination to search further became even sronger and hotter.”

The description of the meeting in the 1483 German edition of Historia trium regum. Strasbourg, Heinrich Knoblotzer

Thus, the first miniature represents this apocryphal moment: when the three rulers of “the three Indies”, led by the same star, finally meet under Jerusalem on a crossroads localized by the Historia somewhere between the Golgotha and the Mount of Olives, both lying outside the city at that time.

And the depiction of the Magi owes something else to the Historia. The previous chapters describe in detail how many treasures, ornate equipments and great entourage – “riche tresoure and riche ornamentis and grete multitude of pepil”, as the contemporary English translation says – were collected by the King Magi before they set out, thereby fulfilling the continuation of the above prophecy of Isaiah: “Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift up your eyes and look about you: … The wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come. Herds of camels will cover your land, young camels of Midian and Ephah. And all from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense and proclaiming the praise of the Lord. All Kedar’s flocks will be gathered to you, the rams of Nebaioth will serve you; they will be accepted as offerings on my altar, and I will adorn my glorious temple. Who are these that fly along like clouds, like doves to their nests? Surely the islands look to me; in the lead are the ships of Tarshish, bringing your children from afar, with their silver and gold, to the honor of the Lord your God.” (Is 60:3-9).

And this is how the depiction of the three Kings Magi develops from a previous three-figure composition into a rich procession covering all the landscape, which really suits kings, and which aristocratic customers like to identify with. It is no coincidence that the first such representation is found in the Book of Hours of Prince Berry, a son of a king of France, jut a few decades after the French translation of the Historia. And this attractive model will soon be followed by other representative commissions. With the spread of International Gothic from the Paris court, the new composition is conveyed to the court of Avignon, and from there, to the painting of Siena and Florence, where, in the absence of aristocrats, the emerging Medici employ it and portray themselves in the shape of the kings that turn their wealth to godly purposes.

Bartolo di Fredi: Adoration of the kings, 1375-85, originally in the Siena Cathedral, today in Siena’s Pinacoteca Nazionale

Gentile da Fabriano: Adoration of the kings, 1423, today in the Uffizi (click for details!)

Benozzo Gozzoli: The march of the Three Kings on the walls of the Medici Palace in Florence, 1459. Detail with the portraits of the Medici family, and with the twelve-year old Lorenzo il Magnifico in the middle. For the complete fresco and its history, see our previous post.