Note 2 — ITALIAN

“The incident of the Adoration of the Magi is related only in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, and there very briefly; but many legends grew up around the Magi and Kings from the East. The number of the Magi was at first indeterminate, but about the Fourth Century the number three became general. It was not until the Fifth and Sixth Centuries that the Magi became Kings and not until the Tenth Century were they represented as crowned Kings. The Magi were for the first time pictured as of different ages, an old man, a middle-aged man, and a young man, in an Eastern manuscript dating from about 550. During the Middle Ages the exact age of each was given—the eldest was sixty, the youngest twenty, and the other forty years old. Their names, the Latin forms of which were Jaspar—later Gaspard—Balthasar, and Melchior, first appeared in a Greek Sixth Century manuscript. A passage attributed to Bede, quoted in Male’s Religious Art in France, Thirteenth Century, states that ‘Melchior, an old man with long, white hair and a long beard, offered gold, symbol of the divine kingdom. The second, named Caspar, young and beardless, with a ruddy countenance, honored Christ in presenting incense, an offering pointing to his divinity. The third, named Balthasar, with a dark skin and a full beard, testified in his offering of myrrh that the Son of Man must die.’ It was not until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries that artists represented the third King as a negro, in accordance with the teachings of the theologians that the three Kings represented the three races of mankind coming to render homage to the Christ Child. The subject of the Adoration of the Magi was a favorite one with artists, particularly in the Fifteenth Century, as it lent itself to the richest and most elaborate treatment. The early legends asserted that St. Joseph did not appear; but in representations dating from the Fifteenth Century he is almost invariably present.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).