Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Cosimo Rosselli
Italian; 15th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
46%
Adoration of the Christ Child. c1495. Oil and gold on wood panel
There are two tiny triplets of magi in the background which I sort of like. But there's a lot of painting here besides them, and it's not very good. Mary is somewhat oddly framed by the manger behind her. The landscape is disheveled and the building is too orderly. The way Mary and Joseph lean in towards each other is far too easy to grasp. And against this, the counter-movements of Christ and the toddler John serve not to complexify the overall figure group, but to sap it of its cogency. The four of them are neither disconnected enough to seem productively chaotic (Piero), nor cohered enough to feel like perfected geometry (Raphael). This structural ambivalence percolates from these four figures out through the whole of the picture, causing all sorts of unarticulated spaces and shapes to fester (see the band of tan ground between the grassy knoll and the base of the manger's foundation). (TFS, 2026)