The Adoration of the Magi

Cosmè Tura was an official court painter to the ruling Este family and its circle in Ferrara. Although this work appears to be an independent circular panel (or tondo), several factors suggest otherwise. First, the painting is smaller than most late fifteenth-century tondos and commemorative birth salvers. Second, it is closely linked to two identically shaped paintings — the Circumcision and the Flight into Egypt — which probably once belonged to a larger pictorial ensemble. Some scholars have suggested that all were part of a predella (lower register) narrative for the artist’s Roverella Altarpiece, commissioned for the church of San Giorgio in Ferrara, but the images do not correspond with an early description of that work.