Explainer

Creed

Explaining Christmas

4 January 2024

11 min read

The Three Kings in Renaissance Florence

Alison Harpur explores the significance of Epiphany in Italian Renaissance art and how it reflects the life of the city.

Alison Harpur

Alison Harpur is an art historian, specialising in Italian Renaissance art, her further interests include theological methodologies for the history of art.

A round nativity scene depicts a procession of visitors including the Three Kings.

The Adoration of the Magi, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

We’re nearly at the end of the first week of January, as I am writing this, and the festivities of Christmas feel like a distant memory already. Although the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas run from Christmas Day until 5 January, by now we have probably put our Christmas jumpers back in the wardrobe and returned to the usual routine. But while sparkling decorations may already have been consigned to the cupboard until next Christmas, it is in these early days of the new year when Christians traditionally celebrate three of the most memorable characters of the Christmas story: the Magi, also known as the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men.

We associate the Magi with children’s nativity plays in the joyful days of December, and with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that look very much like they were cardboard boxes before they were covered with gold paint and sprinkled with glitter. But celebration of the Magi and their presentation of gifts to the newborn Jesus is actually commemorated on 6th January, the feast of Epiphany, when the light of God’s revelation breaks through the dreary January days.

The Magi were interpreted as symbols of the Three Ages of Man (youth, middle age, and old age) and, before the discovery of the Americas, of the three known continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

Epiphany

In the Bible, Matthew says that news of Jesus’s birth was revealed to wise men in the East, who interpreted the appearance of a star as a symbol that the King of the Jews had been born. They travelled to Jerusalem in search of the newborn King, where they encountered Herod, the King of Judea, who was (perhaps not surprisingly) concerned to learn of the birth of an apparent rival to the throne. Herod sent the wise men on to Bethlehem, with instructions to inform him when they found the newborn King, so that he could also go and worship him. We later discover, of course, that Herod’s real intention had been to find Jesus and kill him, in an attempt to remove the threat to his own power. As the wise men proceeded to Bethlehem, the star they had seen went ahead of them and rested over the birthplace of Jesus. There they discovered the newborn Jesus, with his mother, Mary, and they worshipped him, presenting him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Warned in a dream not to return to Herod, the wise men left Bethlehem and returned home.

Matthew doesn’t specify how many wise men visited Jesus, but Christian tradition has settled on three, corresponding to the number of their gifts. We are probably very familiar with these gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh from nativity plays and thousands of Christmas cards. But we may be less familiar with their traditional symbolism in relation to Jesus: gold for his kingship, frankincense for his divinity, and myrrh to foreshadow his sacrificial death. Stories about the Magi also developed in later literature, and the wise men were given the names of Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. The Magi were interpreted as symbols of the Three Ages of Man (youth, middle age, and old age) and, before the discovery of the Americas, of the three known continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

The Washington Adoration of the Magi is not a serene depiction of the biblical kings’ devotion, but the exuberant splendour of a busy Renaissance court.

We are familiar with representations of Epiphany from paintings such as the Adoration of the Magi in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which was painted in Renaissance Florence around the middle of the fifteenth century. It was probably painted by Fra Angelico (c.1395–1455) and Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406–1469), two of the most important Florentine artists of this period, who were also friars in the convents of San Marco and Santa Maria del Carmine respectively. The circular painting, or tondo, represents the Virgin Mary seated in a rocky but verdant landscape, tenderly supporting the Christ Child on her lap, with Joseph standing at her side. Behind them, a bulky ox lies in front of the stable where Christ was born and an ass eats hay from the manger where we presume Christ was laid. Kneeling among the delicately painted flowers in the foreground are the three Magi and their attendants, presenting their gifts to Christ in adoration. Sumptuously dressed in robes of blue, bright red, and pale lilac, decorated with gold, the Magi wear costumes that would have been understood in fifteenth-century Florence to allude to the exoticism of the East.

But the Magi are not the only ones who have come to worship Christ in this painting. Behind them, crowds of people stream downhill through an archway, many of them holding out their hands in gestures of awe and reverence. Some of them look upwards towards the star that was said to have rested over the birthplace of Christ. The Washington Adoration of the Magi is not a serene depiction of the biblical kings’ devotion, but the exuberant splendour of a busy Renaissance court or, in the case of fifteenth-century Florence, a bustling mercantile republic.

Florentine citizens would perform as the Magi and their retinue, processing across the city in elaborate costumes, a rare opportunity to diverge from the strict regulations... that dictated who could wear what in everyday life.

The Magi and the Medici in Renaissance Florence

Epiphany was a hugely significant celebration in fifteenth-century Florence. This was partly because the feast of the Magi on 6th January coincided with another religious celebration, the Baptism of Christ by St John the Baptist, who was Florence’s patron saint. But Renaissance Florence was also a prosperous centre of banking and trade, and the manufacture of luxury goods, and it was populated by wealthy and powerful men who sought to articulate religious devotion through association with the Magi. The Washington Adoration was probably in the collection of the powerful Medici family, who established their position in Florence through banking. They were prominent devotees of the Magi, and they were enormously influential, not least through their cultural patronage.

Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) spent vast amounts of money on artistic and architectural projects in Florence. He sponsored the renovation of San Marco during the 1430s and 1440s, commissioning Fra Angelico to paint frescoes throughout the Dominican convent where he was based. Cosimo even had his own personal cell in San Marco, which was painted with an Adoration of the Magi, perhaps by a young Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1421–1497), who was then an assistant to Fra Angelico. San Marco was dedicated, as we might expect, to St Mark, and also to the early Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian, who were patron saints of Cosimo de’ Medici. But the newly renovated building was ceremonially dedicated not on the feast of St Mark, but on the feast of the Magi, on 6 January 1443.

The Confraternity of the Magi

San Marco was the centre of devotion to the Magi in Renaissance Florence. The confraternity of the Magi, which met at San Marco, was a lay religious group whose members included the Medici family. Confraternities would meet regularly for worship and prayer, and would often perform charitable works. Their membership transcended some of the traditional divides of Renaissance Florence, with artisans and tradesmen meeting together alongside bankers, doctors, and lawyers.

One of the most important activities of the confraternity of the Magi was the organisation of festive processions in honour of the Magi on Epiphany. Florentine citizens would perform as the Magi and their retinue, processing across the city in elaborate costumes, a rare opportunity to diverge from the strict regulations known as sumptuary laws that dictated who could wear what in everyday life. The architectural fabric of Florence was also incorporated into the procession. Herod’s palace was represented by the Baptistery, opposite the Cathedral, or by the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government which was later known as the Palazzo Vecchio. The ceremonial route of the procession wound its way through Florence, past the Medici palace on the Via Larga (now Via Cavour), to its destination in “Bethlehem”, which was (of course) San Marco.

Epiphany was not the only time when Florentine citizens took part in processions honouring the Magi. They were also incorporated into the elaborate festivities associated with the feast of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, which lasted for several days in late June and often included extravagant processions. A Florentine chronicler, whose writings were published and discussed by the art historian Rab Hatfield, recounted the procession of the Magi during the feast of St John the Baptist in 1428, describing “eight horses, covered with silk, with eight pages dressed in silk and with pearls and heraldic ornaments and with shields, their faces angelic, riding one after the other with their livery. And after them, on a great and beautiful horse, came an old man with a white beard, dressed in a gold brocade of crimson and a peaked cap of crimson full of large pearls and with other ornaments of the greatest value, like a king such as those among the Christians.”

Similarly, celebration of the feast of the Magi on Epiphany also embraced broader aspects of Florentine civic devotion. The same chronicler who recounted the feast of St John the Baptist described a multitude of performative themes during the celebration of Epiphany in 1429: “And after lunch there were about seven hundred costumed men on horseback, among whom were the three Magi and their retinue, honourably dressed. And of the striking things they had with them, there were three giants and a wild man and, upon a car, a man impersonating David, who killed the giant with the sling.” It is hard not to read the description of this procession, with giants and a representation of David riding a festive float, and not imagine a scene like the Triumph of David by Pesellino (1422–1457), currently in the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to this Florentine artist.

Given the traditional association of the Magi with the Three Ages of Man, it is no coincidence that Gozzoli portrayed three generations of the Medici family among the followers of the Magi.

The Journey and Adoration of the Magi

The broader visual and material culture of these festive processions informed how Florentine artists designed their paintings, and how contemporary viewers responded to them. There are many fifteenth-century Florentine paintings of the Adoration of the Magi in our galleries and museums. In the National Gallery in London, there are similar bustling scenes of devotion in Botticelli’s Adoration of the Kings (another tondo) of around 1470–1475 and an Adoration by Botticelli and Filippino Lippi (the son of Filippo) from the same period.

One of the most well-known paintings of the Magi from Renaissance Florence was painted on the walls of the Medici Palace chapel in 1459 by Benozzo Gozzoli, the same artist who probably painted the Adoration of the Magi in Cosimo’s personal cell at San Marco. Gozzoli’s frescoes in the Medici Palace chapel represent not the Adoration of the Magi, but the Journey of the Magi, with Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior on horseback, winding their way towards Bethlehem through the landscape depicted on the walls of the chapel. The Magi are accompanied by a vast retinue of followers, which includes portraits of the Medici family and their allies, including Cosimo de’ Medici, his adult son, Piero (1416–1469), and his grandson, Lorenzo (1449–1492). Given the traditional association of the Magi with the Three Ages of Man, it is no coincidence that Gozzoli portrayed three generations of the Medici family among the followers of the Magi, tying the religious narrative to the contemporary realities of Florentine life.

The altarpiece in the Medici Palace chapel was painted by Filippo Lippi, who painted at least part of the Washington Adoration of the Magi. The original altarpiece is now in Berlin, and the painting currently displayed in the chapel is a fifteenth-century copy. It represents the Adoration of the Christ Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (Florence’s patron saint) and St Bernard of Clairvaux (the medieval saint to whom the chapel in the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government, was dedicated). Although the altarpiece had a definitive religious function, the inclusion of those two saints was also distinctly political. But the Magi are not shown in adoration before the Virgin and Child in Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece, nor does Gozzoli show them at their destination in his frescoes. We are left with their journey towards Christ. Perhaps the place of the Magi in adoration before the Virgin and Child was taken by the Medici family themselves during the performance of liturgy in the chapel.

When we look at the processions and sumptuous costumes of the Magi in these paintings, we may recall the descriptions of contemporary processions by Florentine chroniclers. When the original viewers of these paintings looked at them, they would probably have seen them through the lens of the religious festivities that they observed and participated in on their own streets. Many of the artists who painted the works we see today in our galleries and museums also designed the ephemeral decorations for Florentine civic processions, and the relationship between art and performance would probably have been reciprocal.

The feast of Epiphany was hugely important in fifteenth-century Florence. Delving into the history of its celebration sheds light on Renaissance paintings of the Magi, reminding us that the visual and material culture of religious imagery in this period expanded with exuberance beyond churches and palaces throughout the city’s streets. As we consider the significance of Epiphany in these cold, dark days of early January, we can remember the festivities that accompanied the feast of the Magi in Renaissance Florence, and the ways in which the paintings of the Magi that we see in our museums, galleries, churches, and chapels reflect a much broader visual and material culture of civic devotion.

Further reading:

Cristina Acidini Luchinat, The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994)

Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996)

Rab Hatfield, ‘The Compagnia de’ Magi’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol.33, 1970, pp.107-161

Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)

Jeffrey Ruda, ‘The National Gallery Tondo of the “Adoration of the Magi” and the Early Style of Filippo Lippi’, Studies in the History of Art, vol.7, 1975, pp.6-39

Essay

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”