La scuola di Tagaste (dettaglio) - Benozzo Gozzoli

The self-portrait is easy to miss: Gozzoli painted himself peering from behind a rocky outcrop on the west wall of the Medici chapel, one large hand raised as if waving at the procession he has orchestrated across three walls. The fresco, commissioned in 1459 and completed by around 1463, is called the Procession of the Magi, but it reads more as a catalogue of Florentine power. Lorenzo de' Medici rides in gold robes as a young Magus; a youth in blue holds a baby leopard in a gold collar on a leash; and Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus, who had visited Florence twenty years earlier as a guest of the Medici, appears as the eldest king on a white mule.

Gozzoli trained first as a goldsmith's apprentice under Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise doors for the Baptistery shaped his love of dense narrative and decorative precision. He then worked as an assistant to Fra Angelico, absorbing Renaissance spatial conventions without Fra Angelico's devotional gravity. Scholars have been blunt about his limitations: Ernst Gombrich called him a 'minor master' who applied new perspective methods 'gaily without worrying overmuch about their difficulty.' The Procession's rocky landscape still rises flat from bottom to top, indebted more to Ghiberti's bas-relief language than to Masaccio's pictorial space.

None of that troubled his patrons. The subject of the Magi was popular among wealthy Florentines precisely because it licensed the painting of costly brocades, gleaming gold, and thoroughbred horses in quantities that declared the patron's status. The Medici chapel, small enough that access felt like a privilege, was used for family mass and for receiving visiting ambassadors. The procession of kings served as a perfect backdrop for those audiences.

Gozzoli went on to paint extensive fresco cycles at Montefalco (1452, the life of St Francis) and at the Campo Santo in Pisa (from 1469, Old Testament narratives covering thousands of square feet). Neither matches the Medici chapel for concentrated ambition, but both confirm his command of large-scale narrative pageantry. He died at Pistoia in 1497, working almost to the end.