The Adoration of the Magi

Entry

The present painting is the only work by Ter Brugghen carrying a date prior to 1620.³ Like Ter Brugghen’s other paintings from the late 1610s and early 1620s, The Adoration of the Magi has an overall archaic character. Indeed, the primary compositional source has been identified in Dürer’s woodcut of the Adoration from 1511 (RP-P-OB-1290, see fig. a), which shows a similar grouping of the main figures, albeit in mirror image.⁴ Ter Brugghen’s composition, however, is more rigid and more complex. Using the kneeling Melchior as the central axis, a series of diagonals criss-cross the canvas, tying all the figures together. Behind the main diagonal formed by Joseph, Mary, the Christ Child and Melchior is a screen of monumental, vertically aligned figures. Unlike Dürer’s print, the heads of these figures have been lined up, and while Caspar is shown frontally, Joseph and Balthasar flanking him are in pure profile. Their arms, and Mary’s, form additional, very strategically placed horizontals. All this geometry does not have the function of creating clear spatial relationships, but rather adds to the static solemnity of the figures, most of whose eyes are shut, as well as the relief-like nature of the whole. The sheer number of figures pressed into the composition, their geometrical interlinking, the rich colours, the busy folds of, especially, the white fabrics, and the pattern of Melchior’s drapery create an archaizing sense of horror vacui.⁵

It was, perhaps, to counteract the painting’s claustrophobic appearance that two strips of canvas measuring 40 and 14 centimetres respectively were later added to the top and bottom. Other changes, which have since been reversed, included the painting in of a flag and spears in the background.⁶ The change most telling for the later reception of the Adoration was the repainting of the Christ Child’s face, which was probably deemed inappropriately ugly. The Christ Child was likely modelled on an actual newborn infant, perhaps even Ter Brugghen’s own son Richard, who was probably born in 1618, that is to say in the year before the painting was completed. The naturalistically rendered infant is quite unlike the idealized representation of his mother, who reminds one of Carlo Saraceni’s female figures. Van Thiel has compared the naturalistic rendering of the figure of Joseph with Jordaens’s figures of old men.⁷ There is, however, no evidence that Ter Brugghen would have known Jordaens’s work, and the figure of Joseph in the Adoration seems much closer to Caravaggio. While it is certainly true that the theme of the Adoration of the Magi was not a popular one in Caravaggio’s circle, and Ter Brugghen’s painting has nothing directly to do with the Italian master and his immediate followers,⁸ the naturalistic rendering of some of the figures is indebted to his example. Ter Brugghen’s use of ‘Mannerist’ colours⁹ – the pastel purple of the young boy peering out from behind Balthasar, and the blue of the turbaned woman on horseback in the background – anticipate not only his own colouristic innovations of the 1620s but those of Van Baburen and Honthorst as well.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 36.