This monumental altarpiece signed by Cristobal de Villalpando (1649–1714), an artist born in Mexico City of an influential Spanish family, is one of many exuberantly Baroque religious works by this master, several still in place in Mexican churches.

Cristobal, trained in Mexico City by Baltasar de Echave Rioja, son of one of the first Hispanic artists to emigrate to ‘New Spain’ (as Mexico was then known), was inspired by the style of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, whose works he could have known through engravings. Like the Flemish painter, his colonial emulator treated sacred themes with theatrical verve, giving pride of place to rich costumes and grandiloquent gestures.

His Adoration of the Magi presents the Wise Men as kings, clothing the kneeling personage at the centre in an ermine-bordered mantle and setting a crown atop the turban of the standing figure at our left. The other standing figure (just above the kneeling king) has black skin, reinforcing the traditional belief that the Wise Men who journeyed to Bethlehem represented all human civilizations and ethnicities. He also reminds us that seventeenth-century New Spain forced enslaved people from Africa to work in its mines and plantations in this period.

In colonial Mexico, whose gold, silver, and cane sugar enriched its Spanish rulers, Cristobal de Villalpando stresses the tribute of wealth implied by the Magi’s gifts, evoking Jerusalem’s future splendour as described in Isaiah 60:3–5:

The nations will come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness. … At this sight you will grow radiant, your heart will throb and dilate, since the riches of the sea will flow to you, and the wealth of the nations come to you. (NJB)

In such a context, the inclusion of a Black man among the Magi might perhaps also have troubled the reigning assumptions of those who were prosecuting Spain’s colonial project with the help of enslaved people.

Maybe it caused other hearts to ‘throb’ than those of the mine and plantation owners.