Jacopo Bassano (1510-1592)

The Adoration of the Magi

Venice, about 1550

Oil on canvas

94.3 x 130 cm

A crowd gather in the rolling countryside of the artist’s hometown of Bassano, Veneto. On the left, Joseph and Mary gaze lovingly at their son, Jesus. On the right, two of the magi (wise men) are surrounded by a bustling crowd. The elderly wise man bridges the gap between the groups. He removes his crown and kneels in front of Jesus in worship. The figures are positioned amongst Roman ruins, symbolic of Christianity’s dominion in the Roman Empire since the fourth century.

The wise men dressed in red is Balthazar. He turns away from the viewer, disguising his face. Since the eighth century, Balthazar has been traditionally described as a Black African. This interpretation reinforced Catholicism’s transnational importance. The tradition became popular in Renaissance paintings, particularly around European seaports like Venice or Antwerp. It is one of the only positive representations of blackness in the period. It is not a reflection of racial equality in Renaissance Venice but is instead a juxtaposition to the reality of the rising slave trade.

Balthazar’s ethnicity is only just visible in Bassano’s painting, which is representative of Black history’s hidden narratives. To learn more about the depiction of Blackness in European religious paintings, see Celeste Garduño Carbajal’s re-interpretation project on the Barber’s Van Eyck’s Ecce Homo.

Purchased 1978 (No. 78.1)

Further reading:

Aikema, Bernard, Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform, ca. 1535-1600, Princeton, 1996, pp. 52-54.

Ballarin, Alessandro, and Giuliana Ericani, Jacopo Bassano e Lo Stupendo Inganno Dell’Occhio, Milan, 2010.

Ballarin, Alessandro, Jacopo Bassano (Pittura del Rinascimento nell’Italia settentrionale), Padua, 1996.

Kaplan, Paul H. D., ‘The Black Magus in the Public Sphere’, in Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Bryan C. Keen and Kristen Collins, Los Angeles: Getty, 2023, pp. 97-100.

O’Kane, Martin, ‘The Artist as Reader of the Bible: Visual Exegesis and the Adoration of the Magi’, Biblical Interpretation, 13/4, 2005, pp. 364-67.