Presentation at the Temple

The Presentation of Christ at the Temple — the ceremony described in Luke 2:22-38 in which Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth — was a subject that united narrative drama with legal and liturgical significance. The encounter with the elderly prophet Simeon, who recognised the child as the awaited Messiah and spoke the Nunc Dimittis, gave painters the opportunity to show the meeting of the old dispensation with the new: an aged, expectant Judaism finally receiving the fulfilment of its prophecy. Gozzoli's Philadelphia Museum version places this scene within his characteristic architectural setting — a colonnaded temple interior suggesting classical antiquity filtered through a Quattrocento perspective framework. The scene also had personal resonance for devotional viewers as a model for offering one's children to God, and was frequently chosen for altarpieces in churches with dedications to the Purification of the Virgin or the Holy Family.

The temple interior setting requires illusionistic architectural perspective, a challenge Gozzoli met by employing Brunelleschian recession schemes adapted from Florentine fresco traditions. Figures are arranged along a foreground plane with secondary figures receding between the columns. The warm terracotta and pale stone palette used for the architecture contrasts with the richly coloured figures in the foreground.