Flemish School of Mechelen, 18th century

Flemish School of Mechelen, 18th century.
"The Adoration of the Magi".
Rectangular plate of carved alabaster.
Back frame painted black.
Old restorations (has been broken), traces of glue. With chipping and losses. With cracks and tears due to age.
Measurements: 11.5 x 9.5 cm; 17 x 15 cm (frame).
The Adoration of the Magi refers to the biblical story of the visit and celebration of the Child Jesus by the three wise men. During the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, this event was a common subject for artists. The Virgin Mary and Child appear in the center of the carving and the three kings kneel before them in adoration.
The three kings personify youth, maturity and old age. They bear symbolic gifts for the Savior: gold, indicating royalty; frankincense, indicating divinity; and myrrh, an emblem of death prefiguring the Passion of Christ.
Alabaster was a popular material in European sculpture, especially between the 14th and 17th centuries. Its relative availability and its characteristic ease of sculpting made it a very suitable material for both large monuments and small objects, for mass production and for individual works, from England to Spain and from France to the Netherlands, Germany and Poland.
The foundations of the Mechelen alabaster industry were laid by a small group of artists, some of them foreigners, who worked in the early 16th century for the court of Margaret of Austria in the then new Renaissance style that had been imported from Italy. Their presence in Mechelen stimulated local carvers to work alabaster in this new vocabulary of forms.
The main products of these so-called "minor works carvers" were these small altarpieces decorated with mythological and biblical themes that were produced well into the first half of the 17th century.