Magi in motion. The making of an image in early Christian Rome
JbAC 63 (2020) Seiten: 188-216
mit Tafeln 7/12
The story of the Magi who travelled from the east to Judea in search of the Messiah is
among the most popular themes in the history of Christian art. A stock image of the
men, offering precious gifts to the Christ Child and Mary, had emerged by the fourth
century, and scholars are largely in agreement that Roman imperial art provided pictorial
models for its creation, and impetus for its circulation across the Mediterranean
into the fifth century. Attention has been given to the ways that clothing, posture and
gesture were used to present the Eastern identity of the Magi and to emphasise their
migration (Mt. 2,9/11). This paper provides a fresh examination of the earliest surviving
representations of the story, produced in Rome sometime in the late third or early
fourth centuries, to reconsider the questions of how and why their story was first pictorialized.
Attention to the emphasis on their movement, specifically of ritual offering of
gifts in procession, brings the iconography into dialogue with a broader set of pictorial
models and associations than allowed by previous interpretations tethered exclusively
to images drawn from imperial art.
Felicity Harley-McGowan