• DOI:10.1086/683137
• Corpus ID: 194161866

The Birth of Ruins in Quattrocento Adoration Paintings

@article{Hui2015TheBO,
  title={The Birth of Ruins in Quattrocento Adoration Paintings},
  author={Andrew M. Hui},
  journal={I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance},
  year={2015},
  volume={18},
  pages={319 - 348}
}

• Andrew M. Hui
• Published 1 September 2015
• Art
• I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY , Italian pictorial representations of the Adoration of the Magi genre began to change as classical architecture—in particular ruins—played an increasingly prominent role. Earlier, for example, the shelter of the Holy Family in Domenico Veneziano’s Adoration of the Magi, dated 1439–43, is but a simple wooden hut (fig. 1). Some two decades prior, in Gentile Fabriano’s sumptuous rendering (fig. 2), the biblical manger is an inconspicuous part of a larger composition: amid the abundance of wealth and opulence, the facade is simple and monochromatic, although there is a hint of a fracture in its top right corner. In the trecento nativity panel of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maesta altarpiece (1308–11), there is even less emphasis on architectural features (fig. 3). Mary and the infant Jesus are enveloped within a manger, itself enfolded within a grotto, the former motif typical of the northern European Gothic style, and the latter found in Byzantine manuscript illuminations. In contrast, Sandro Botticelli in his Adoration of the Magi (1472–73) places an incomplete classical structure in its perspectival center (fig. 4). Occupying the majority of the painting, the once humble manger is transformed into an impressive structure of three rows of smooth rectilinear Doric columns bearing a broken entablature on which a gabled wooden roof rests. Although clearly dominant, this is set within a suite of architectural ensembles that frame the painting: a