The Adoration of the Magi

This anonymous Ducciesque artist is named after a Madonna in the Siena Seminary that comes close to his master Segna di Bonaventura but yet reveals a distinctive manner. His style is best summed up by Stubblebine (loc. cit., I): 'The Seminary Madonna Master is less brooding and somber than Segna, and his style is rather flatter; he seldom renders the dramatic shadowing that one finds so often in Segna. In his smaller works, his figures can become paper-thin. He has a particular way of rendering hair in wiry, wavy clumps, in patches of light and dark'.

The present picture originally belonged to a lost larger work by the artist of which the only other known surviving part is a Nativity, of the same shape, formerly in a German private collection (see Stubblebine, op. cit., II, fig. 344). They are thought to have been gables from the upper part of an altarpiece, their truncated shape suggesting that they would have been surmounted by a small angel panel in imitation of the arrangement on the Cathedral Maestà. Indeed, the extent of the artist's debt to the Maestà is made abundantly clear from the present composition, which borrows unashamedly from the Adoration scene within the lower part of the altarpiece: the shed set into a cave; the horses entering the scene from the left; the placing of the Madonna and Child, and the motif of the king kissing the Christ Child's feet.