The Chapel of the Magi

by Benozzo Gozzoli

A glittering cavalcade of men and animals winds through a rocky landscape under an azure sky. The men are dressed in all the luxury of Italian fifteenth-century fashions, in brilliant colors, damask, gold brocade. They ride horses and camels with various exotic creatures to amuse them - dogs, cheetahs, peacocks and monkeys. In the background are forests and picturesque towered towns. This is the procession of the Magi on their way to worship the newborn Christ, painted in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici, Florence, in 1459. The artist was Benozzo Gozzoli, formerly an assistant of Fra Angelico. For their sheer beauty, their precision, and their almost fairy-tale-like quality, these frescoes have always been among the most popular of all Western paintings. The Medici family chapel is a jewel-like room and, despite changes that have been made to it over the years, it houses the best preserved of Renaissance fresco cycles. This magnificent volume reproduces the frescoes in all their glory,