Adoration of the Magi (1642): Art, History and Details

Adoration of the Magi (1642) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Guido Reni (Italian, 1575–1642).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This large altarpiece was in the artist's studio when he died, and parts of the composition appear incomplete. Some figures lack color, and Reni never finished the wooden structure. The silvery ground layer appears everywhere, as do his changes to the composition, such as the dog's head above the angel's right knee and the adjustment to Christ's right leg, covered in blue. However, Reni's death does not fully explain the unfinished quality. Toward the end of his career, he increasingly painted in a loose and sketchy manner—popular with collectors at the time—an approach implying that concrete forms could never depict the ideal, spiritual world Reni aimed to present.

Object facts

• Title: Adoration of the Magi
• Date: 1642
• Creator attribution: Guido Reni (Italian, 1575–1642)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 378 x 280.5 x 10.5 cm (148 13/16 x 110 7/16 x 4 1/8 in.); Unframed: 367.3 x 268.6 cm (144 5/8 x 105 3/4 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1969.132

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Magi." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LVIII no. 10 (December, 1971):278-289.
• Emiliani, Andrea. "Un Viaggio Sconosciuto di Francesco Gessi." Arte Antica e Moderna I (1958): 53-57. Attributed to Francesco Gessi.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.