Description
In contrast to many of Signorelli's paintings, the scene is tranquil and rather static, with attention focused on the principal figures who are lined up across the foreground of the picture space. The three Biblical Magi (or Three Kings) are, as was usual, differentiated by age and race, although their names, ages and races are not consistent. The black king is most often a young figure, but here the king at the left is white and blond-haired, the kneeling one in the centre in his prime, and the king at right has a dark complexion, though hardly any darker than that of Saint Joseph with whom he is talking.Attribution
Though most art historians now attribute the painting to Signorelli, with assistance from his workshop team, some in the past thought that he had only designed or underdrawing, underdrawn the composition, leaving the painting to his team. Maud Cruttwell, in the first monograph in English, published in 1899, following Crowe and Cavalcaselle, thought he had done the "drawing only". She bases this in part on the "impressive dignity" of the main figures, but also from what she regards as the tell-tale "badly-drawn horses ... for it will be noticed all through his work that he has never cared to thoroughly master their form, and paints them always with curious mannerisms of too closely-placed nostrils, and human eyebrows, which show how little attention he had given to their anatomy."Predella
At least later in his career, Signorelli sometimes did the drawn cartoon for the main section of altarpieces, but left the painting to his workshop. But he might paint the small predella panels himself, as is thought to have been the case for a work of 1521. The National Gallery of Art in Washington has a ''Marriage of the Virgin'', and Philadelphia an ''Annunciation'', and in Richmond, Virginia, there is a ''Presentation of the Virgin''. The panel the Louvre says is in a Scottish private collection perhaps belongs to Robert Lindsay, 29th Earl of Crawford; Cruttwell listed Lord Crawford's collection in London as having two Signorelli predella parts: "1. Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, Meeting of Joachim and Anna. 2. Nativity of Mary, Birth of the Virgin". It is not clear when the predella panels were separated from the main scene. They first went to a smaller church on Cortona, and by 1819 were in a private collection there.History
The altarpiece was perhaps commissioned by Vitellozzo Vitelli, who like his father Niccolò Vitelli (d. 1486) was a condottiero and ruler of the town. Signorelli painted portraits of both of them. A few years later Vitellozzo fell out with Cesare Borgia, who had him strangled in 1502, after which the town was taken into the Papal States. The main panel was still in the monastery in 1617. After an earthquake in 1789 it was probably sold to Pope Pius VI; it is recorded in his family's Palazzo Braschi in Rome in 1838. At some point thereafter it passed to the Campana collection in Rome (as Campana 245), then after Giampietro Campana's bankruptcy and imprisonment for fraud it was sequestered with the rest of the collection by the Papal States, Papal government in 1861, who arranged to sell it to the Louvre; it entered their collection in 1863 (as MI 540).LouvreNotes
References
* "Christie's"