This painting sets the Old Testament story of the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in an imaginary palace based on Italian Renaissance architecture. Members of the king’s court and servants talk among themselves in and around the ornate Renaissance buildings. A court jester, dogs, and monkeys are present. At the center of the scene, beneath a canopy and behind the king and queen, is a chalice on an altar.
According to the Old Testament, the Queen of Sheba heard of King Solomon’s wisdom and the magnificence of his court and visited Jerusalem to verify these reports. She brought gifts of spices, gold, and precious stones. Upon seeing his glorious court and testing the king’s wisdom with many riddles, the queen returned to her land. However, popular legends grew around the biblical story – one telling of the marriage of these two rulers.
The complex architecture of Solomon’s temple is a masterful demonstration of Renaissance one-point or linear perspective. The parallel lines of the marble floor, the pink banisters, and the ceiling tiles all converge at the chalice, drawing the eye from the foreground to the background of the painting. The composition is symmetrical, with architectural elements and arrangements of figures balanced to the left and right. The brilliant colors, the gold surfaces, the strictly outlined figures, and the careful attention to naturalistic details contribute to the rich, luxurious style of this painting. This style followed the court taste of the ruling family of Ferrara in the fifteenth century.
The artist used egg tempera paints on a wooden panel to create this picture. The wood was smoothed and sealed with a layer of gesso, a gypsum and glue paste combination. The composition was probably sketched onto the gesso before painting began. To make paints, the artist mixed ground pigments from plants and minerals with egg yolk. Egg yolk dries very quickly, so the artist applied his colors in small, carefully blended brushstrokes. The gold highlights are actually thin pieces of gold leaf applied to the painting. The designs in the gold halos and fabrics were created with a punch, a tool used to incise the gold leaf designs.
Some round panels, or tondos, originally served as ceremonial serving trays commissioned to commemorate a birth or marriage. The practice of giving such paintings as gifts was common in the humanist courts of Italy during the 15th century. This tray in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s collection is so lavish that it is unlikely it was used more than once or twice at the time of childbirth before being hung on the wall.
Located in the lowlands just south of the Po River in northern Italy, Ferrara was ruled by the Este family from about 1250 to 1598. During the Renaissance, this noble family brought many foreign artists to paint at their magnificent court. The Este court was an important center of art, literature, and learning during the Renaissance.
The Italian Renaissance emerged gradually during the 14th century and flourished during the 15th and 16th centuries. The term Renaissance means “rebirth,” referring to the revival of interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture. As artists looked to these civilizations for inspiration, they began to shed the stylized conventions of medieval art in favor of greater realism. The innovation of linear and other forms of perspective created a style of painting that defined Western art until the beginning of the 20th century.
