| Zusammenfassung: | The story of the Magi who travelled from the east to Judea in search of the Messiah is among the most popular themes in the history of Christian art. A stock image of the men, offering precious gifts to the Christ Child and Mary, had emerged by the fourth century, and scholars are largely in agreement that Roman imperial art provided pictorial models for its creation, and impetus for its circulation across the Mediterranean into the fifth century. Attention has been given to the ways that clothing, posture and gesture were used to present the Eastern identity of the Magi and to emphasise their migration (Mt. 2,9/11). This paper provides a fresh examination of the earliest surviving representations of the story, produced in Rome sometime in the late third or early fourth centuries, to reconsider the questions of how and why their story was first pictorialized. Attention to the emphasis on their movement, specifically of ritual offering of gifts in procession, brings the iconography into dialogue with a broader set of pictorial models and associations than allowed by previous interpretations tethered exclusively to images drawn from imperial art.
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