Getty Museum
The Adoration of the Magi
Creator
Guillaume CourtoisFrench Artist · 1628–1679
All works by this person →At about age seven, painter's son Guillaume Courtois left France for Italy with his teenage brother. They followed the military campaigns that his brother drew, then studied in Bologna, Florence, and Siena, arriving in Rome by 1638. Courtois trained himself by copying Giovanni Lanfranco's and Andrea Sacchi's works and by drawing from nude models. He first studied under Pietro da Cortona, his most
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1665
- Medium
- Red chalk heightened with white (partly oxidized), the outlines indented with the stylus
- Culture
- French
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Guillaume Courtois chose to set the private scene of the three Magi bringing gifts to the baby Jesus amidst excited onlookers. A typically varied Baroque crowd surrounds the calm, carefully composed central figures. Betraying his classicizing orientation, Courtois seated the Virgin on a fluted column and drew a Doric one behind the stable. Courtois made this highly finished study for an engraving reproduced in a book printed in Rome in 1662. The missal book included engravings after drawings by leading contemporary painters working in Italy, mostly of New Testament subjects; copies are rare today. The indentations throughout the sheet indicate that someone used a stylus to trace the drawing before making the print.
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