page_title: Adoration of the Kings (David, London)
section_title: Original altarpiece
hierarchical_section_title: Adoration of the Kings (David, London) / Original altarpiece
context_page_description: The Adoration of the Kings by the Early Netherlandish painter Gerard David is a painting in oil on panel, probably from after 1515, now in the National Gallery in London. The painted surface measures some 60 by 59.2 centimetres, and the panel is about 2 centimetres larger in both dimensions. The panel comes from a dismantled altarpiece from which one other panel appears to survive, the Lamentation that is also in the National Gallery.
  The Adoration of the Magi is a common subject, which often represents the Nativity of Jesus in art, especially in this period, when the opportunity was often taken to show rich costumes in the figures of the Biblical Magi and their retinue, as for example in the slightly earlier Adoration by Jan Gossaert, also in the National Gallery, to which David is sometimes thought to have contributed. Though that is a much larger and more crowded painting, David may have borrowed aspects of the composition here from it.
context_section_description: For all the known history of the painting it has been together with the NG 1078 Lamentation, but this goes no further back than early 19th-century London.  Whether the two originally formed part of the same polytych is not quite certain, but it seems most likely.  The Lamentation is some 3 cm larger in both dimensions, and its underdrawing "is inconsistent in style and some parts can be reconciled with the underdrawing of the Adoration", but others not.   In the two panels the figures are about the same size, and the horizons at the same level, and no other panels of these dimensions are attributed to David or his workshop.  Both are planed down at the back, and may originally have been painted on both sides, as parts of the wings of an altarpiece on the Life of Christ or Life of the Virgin, with a central panel about four times the size of these ones.
caption: Detail of the heads at right
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