The Journey of the Magi

Sassetta's Journey of the Magi, painted around 1434 for the Metropolitan Museum, belongs to the predella of the Arte della Lana altarpiece commissioned for Siena's wool guild. The Epiphany theme, with its procession of exotic visitors, allowed Sassetta to create one of the most enchanting landscape narratives in fifteenth-century Italian painting. Sassetta — Stefano di Giovanni — was the dominant painter in Siena during the first half of the fifteenth century, maintaining the city's Gothic tradition of refined spirituality and jewel-like color even as Florentine artists were developing the naturalistic revolution of the Early Renaissance.

The sinuous procession winds through a rolling Sienese landscape rendered in Sassetta's luminous palette of blues and greens, with the miniature-like precision of the riders and landscape creating an effect of lyrical, tapestry-like beauty.