Adoration of the Magi

Lippo d'Andrea was a Florentine painter of the late Trecento who continued the Giottesque tradition into the early fifteenth century, working alongside the older generation of painters as the innovations of Brunelleschi and Masaccio were beginning to transform Florentine art. His Adoration of the Magi, dated around 1400, belongs to the transitional moment between the flat, gilded medieval altarpiece tradition and the newer naturalistic painting. In Florence around 1400, the Adoration was particularly associated with the Confraternity of the Magi, whose annual pageant through the city streets kept the subject at the center of civic religious life.

Lippo d'Andrea's style retains the gold ground and hieratic scaling of Trecento convention while introducing slightly more varied poses and individuated faces in the secondary figures. The compositional arrangement follows established types — the three kings in a diagonal approach, the Holy Family static and frontal — that allowed viewers to read the scene's meaning through familiar visual conventions.