Why Did Leonardo Paint Ruins Behind the Baby Jesus?
Why Did Leonardo Paint Ruins Behind the Baby Jesus?
Look past the crowd surrounding Mary and Jesus in Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi. Above them, a monumental building rises in broken sections. Stairs lead through the structure, arches open beneath it, and small figures work among its remains.
Why place this activity behind a scene of worship?
Art historian Emanuela Ferretti (2020) explores two possible interpretations: the building might evoke ancient Rome, or it might represent the Temple of Jerusalem. Both approaches suggest that the architecture contributes to the painting’s religious meaning. One leads us to a medieval legend about a temple that was supposed to last forever.
A Temple That Would Stand Forever
In the Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine recounts a story about Rome’s Temple of Peace. The Romans asked Apollo how long their temple would endure. The answer was that it would stand until a virgin gave birth.
They believed this meant forever.
According to the legend, however, the temple collapsed on the night Mary gave birth to Christ (de Voragine, trans. Ryan, 1993, as cited in Ferretti, 2020, p. 291).
This is a medieval Christian account of a miraculous event, rather than an established account of a Roman building’s destruction. Its importance for understanding Renaissance art lies in the meaning it offered: Christ’s birth could be imagined as a moment when the old religious order literally fell apart.
Ferretti (2020) considers this tradition as one possible context for Leonardo’s ruins. A damaged classical building behind Mary and Jesus could evoke the passing of the pagan world and the arrival of Christianity.
The connection is plausible, but it does not establish that Leonardo intended to paint the legendary Temple of Peace.
Which Ancient Building?
Ferretti’s investigation goes beyond the general symbolism of ruins. She examines the building’s architectural features and compares them with ancient structures known through Renaissance drawings and descriptions.
One important comparison concerns the surviving substructures of the Temple of the Deified Claudius in Rome. Drawings of this monument offered Renaissance artists a vocabulary of substantial masonry, repeated arches, and changes in elevation (Ferretti, 2020).
The complication is that Renaissance scholars did not always identify ancient ruins as archaeologists do today. Different writers associated these remains with different buildings and histories. Understanding what a monument meant to Leonardo’s contemporaries therefore requires investigating their interpretations as well as its actual ancient identity.
An architectural model and a symbolic identity also need not be identical. Leonardo could have borrowed forms associated with one ancient structure while using them to evoke a broader idea about Rome, antiquity, or religious change. Ferretti’s discussion leaves room for that distinction rather than reducing the painted building to a straightforward portrait of a single monument.
Another Possibility: Jerusalem
Ferretti (2020) also proposes that the architecture might evoke the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. She examines the arrangement of stairs, the columns and their ornament, and descriptions of the temple available through biblical texts and accounts of pilgrimage.
Under this interpretation, the building would draw the viewer into a different set of Christian associations.
Christian writers connected the temple’s destruction and renewal with Christ and with the Church. Ferretti considers these ideas alongside the writings of Marsilio Ficino and the religious and intellectual culture of late fifteenth-century Florence. Within that historical framework, a ruined temple could express a Christian claim that an earlier religious order had been superseded.
That is an interpretation of the painting through the theology of its period. It should not be mistaken for proof that Leonardo followed a particular text or received a specific set of instructions.
Ferretti presents the Roman and Jerusalem readings as plausible possibilities. Neither becomes a certain identification.
Look Closely: People Are Building
There is another detail that complicates a simple story of destruction.
People are working around the building.
The Uffizi’s description draws attention to construction activity on the left side of the painting. Daniela Parenti identifies the structure tentatively as a temple and interprets its association with peace in contrast to the fighting horsemen on the right (Parenti, n.d.).
The background therefore contains more than abandoned remains. Leonardo places activity, labor, and construction beside damaged architecture.
For viewers, this opens a further question: how might the work underway relate to the scene around Mary and Christ? Ruin and renewal occupy the same space. Although the workers do not settle the building’s identity, they make it harder to treat the architecture as a simple emblem of something that has ended.
An Unfinished Painting, an Open Question
The Adoration was commissioned for the high altar of the Augustinian church of San Donato a Scopeto, outside Florence. Leonardo left the work unfinished when he departed for Milan. The friars eventually commissioned a replacement from Filippino Lippi, completed in 1496 (Parenti, n.d.).
Its unfinished state allows us to see figures and architectural ideas at different stages of development. It also leaves questions that the surviving evidence cannot conclusively answer.
The Temple of Peace legend offers one memorable way into the painting. Ferretti’s research shows why that story deserves consideration while also explaining why other readings remain possible.
Next time you look at Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, follow the stairs into the background. Notice the broken masonry, the arches, and the workers above them. Those small details belong to the painting’s larger exploration of what Christ’s arrival means.
Sources and Further Reading
Ferretti, E. (2020). Prophecies and ruins: Architectural sources for Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 23(2), 273–302. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48801085
Parenti, D. (n.d.). Adoration of the Magi (San Donato in Scopeto). Uffizi Galleries. https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/leonardo-adoration-of-the-magi
De Voragine, J. (1993). The Golden Legend: Readings on the saints (W. G. Ryan, Trans., Vol. 1, pp. 38–39). Princeton University Press. The relevant passage is quoted in Ferretti (2020, p. 291).
De Voragine, J. (n.d.). The Nativity of Our Lord (W. Caxton, Trans.). Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GL-vol1-nativity.asp
Note on the online text: Fordham provides an older English translation. Its Temple of Peace passage appears incomplete, with an abrupt transition before the account of the collapse. The discussion above follows the complete passage reproduced by Ferretti.
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