ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some “narrative” images in a fifteenth century French Missal which contain novel responses to the accompanying liturgical text. The themes are rare enough to invite study, and in seeking to establish their significance in terms of a specific historical context the discussion addresses some general questions about the nature of narrative painting in late-medieval manuscripts. In panel painting of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century The Meeting of the Magi does not seem to have been treated as a separate theme. In a group of paintings of The Adoration stemming from fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy, the horsemen in the background are actually converging, and it has been assumed that the event portrayed is the Meeting of the Three Kings, a legend recounted in a late medieval chronicle. However, in these Italian paintings the retinues contain unbridled animals fighting one another, and agitated grooms ready to intervene with drawn swords.
