Description
The Adoration of the Magi – the greatest unfinished painting of the Renaissance
The Adoration of the Magi is a painting Leonardo never finished – and that is exactly what makes it unique. On the large wooden panel we see precisely what finished masterpieces never show us: how Leonardo thought. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this unusual, brown-and-gold image into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A commission cut short by the move to Milan
In 1481 the Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto, outside Florence, commissioned an altarpiece from Leonardo. He began on a grand scale: he prepared a panel of 246 × 243 cm and drew onto it, in charcoal, ink and watercolour, a composition of several dozen figures. In 1482 he left the whole thing behind and went to Milan, to the court of Ludovico Sforza. The painting stayed in that state, and since 1670 it has hung in the Uffizi in Florence.
What the painting shows
At the centre sits the Virgin with the Child, and around her a crowd presses in a semicircle: the magi bearing gifts, horses, people straining to see. Behind them rise the ruins of an ancient building and a scene of cavalry battle – an unusual, almost restless backdrop for a sacred event. It is this sheer quantity of movement that makes the work more modern than anything else of its time.
A painting in which you can see the master thinking
Because the work was never completed, all of Leonardo’s drawing survives beneath the surface. In 2002 Maurizio Seracini made more than 2,400 infrared records of this underdrawing, revealing how densely Leonardo corrected and shifted his figures. Between 2012 and 2017 the Opificio delle Pietre Dure cleaned the painting; after cleaning, Leonardo’s charcoal strokes are clearly visible again. Seracini’s conclusion – that none of the visible paint is Leonardo’s – remains contested among scholars and is not generally accepted; we report it as a position, not as fact.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of The Adoration of the Magi is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. The almost square format and the warm brown-gold range sit well in a study, a library or a living room. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s other unfinished works: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, The Battle of Anghiari (Detail) and La Scapigliata.
- Subject: The Adoration of the Magi, Leonardo da Vinci, 1481–1482
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: Leonardo abandoned the work when he left for Milan – what remains is the underdrawing, in which his thinking is visible
