January 6, 2021, the Epiphany

 

The Magi have returned home, both comforted and discomfited after their journey to find Jesus.

 

 

 

 Journey of the Magi, 1927.  T.S. Eliot, Anglo-American, 1888-1965 

 

The poet is expressing how hard is the initiation into and how solitary the continuing discipline of the spiritual journey.

Which he would not, nevertheless, forego, for its richest aid to the living of a life which knows that death is coming.

 

 

 

The Journey of the Magi, c.1433-35, tempera and gold on wood. 

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), c. 1400-1450), Italian, Siena, Cortona).  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY from whose website this photo

 

 

 

 

The Adoration of the Magi, 1440-1460, tempera on panel. 

Fra Angelico, 1395-1455; and Fra Filippo Lippi, 1406-1459, Florence, Italy.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 

 

 

 

The Three Wise Men, 1991, glass beads, plastic cylinders, cotton, epoxy, plywood. 

Jimoh Buraimoh, Nigerian born 1943.  Baltimore Art Museum. 

 

Beadwork, the museum notes, has a long tradition as an embellishment technique among the Yoruba. 

 

Here, at a time of immense turmoil in Nigeria in the 1990s, the artist portrays, as the Three Wise Men, the three men who negotiated the independence of Nigeria from the British in 1960 after a hundred years of alien governance:

Al-Haji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, 1909-1966;  Nnamdi Azikiwe, 1904-1996;  Abafemi Awolowo, 1909-1987