Epiphany

In honor of their big day, here are Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, in a rather strange detail from Polyptych with the Nativity, from the mid-fifteenth century workshop of Rogier van der Weyden and now in the Cloisters in Manhattan. I had never heard any story about the Magi bathing at Mount Victorial, let alone seen it pictured. When I googled the phrase, it brought me to this same picture (you can see the whole thing here). Perhaps I shall have to pick up that copy of The Golden Legend that has been waiting patiently on the shelf for me all these years.

This is one of those paintings in which the same people are doing different things at the same time; although this shot does look like an all-Elder version of Susannah and the Elders, the surprised man at the right is just the oldest of the Magi, looking at an apparition of the newly born Christ Child floating above his head, in a scene temporally and physically removed from the bathing.

According to the label, this altarpiece is "said to have come from a nunnery [nunnery? what a strange Elizabethan word to use instead of convent] in Segovia, Spain." Perhaps the nuns merely liked cleanliness. I await further interpretations.