The Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi is perhaps - together with the Primavera and the Birth of Venus in the same museum - the most famous and certainly among the most successful and fascinating paintings by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), one of the largest and famous artists of our Renaissance, the one that perhaps best represents the cultural richness, the humanistic propensities and at the same time the contradictions and conflicts of Medici Florence in the last third of the fifteenth century.

It was commissioned around 1475 for his family chapel - dedicated to the Epiphany - in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence by the money changer Guasparre di Zanobi da Lama, an important figure from the Medici entourage whom he wanted to represent in the figures of the three wise men: in that of Gaspare the "founder" and pater patriae Cosimo the elder, who died in 1464; in those of the other two kings in red and white kneeling in the foreground and talking to each other, respectively those of his two sons Piero the Gouty, who died in 1469, and Giovanni, who died in 1463; while those of the three characters standing on the far left, the first of whom armed with a sword, would depict his nephew Giuliano de' Medici (who had won a joust in '75), the poet Angelo Poliziano and the other humanist Pico della Mirandola; in that of the young man just behind them, Cosimo's brother, Lorenzo di Giovanni de' Medici; in that of a thoughtful young man standing and wearing black robes who opens the group on the right, the other nephew Lorenzo de' Medici; and finally in the two, who behind him turn their gaze towards the viewer, one white-haired and the other elegantly wrapped in a yellow cloak, the client Guasparre di Zanobi and the then thirty-year-old painter Sandro Botticelli.

Created in the years of the artist's first maturity, a few years after having frequented the workshops of Filippo Lippi and Verrocchio and shortly after the Fortezza painted in 1470 for the Medici, but before the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and the already mentioned masterpieces of the Uffizi, the Primavera , Pallas and the Birth of Venus, the work is remembered in church as being by Botticelli since Albertini, in 1510, and must have struck contemporaries for the presence in the sacred scene of «several people portrayed from nature» (Anonymous Magliabechiano 1542-48), for the indescribable "beauty that Sandro showed in the heads that can be seen, ... some in the face, some in profile" and for "the perfection of his teaching, ... in colouring, in drawing and in composition" ( Vasari 1550).