Doré's 1866 engraving of the Adoration of the Magi depicts the scene that Christian tradition has called the Epiphany - the manifestation of the Christ child to the nations - with the full visual splendor that Matthew 2's narrative warrants. The three kings - their number not specified by Matthew but settled by the tradition of three gifts - kneel in eastern robes before the infant Jesus, their richly caparisoned camels visible in the background, while the star's light streams into the stable from above, identifying the location and illuminating the scene with a quality of light that belongs to another register of reality than the ordinary lamplight of a stable.
Matthew 2:1-12 is one of the most theologically dense passages in the birth narratives. The Magi are not identified as kings in the text - that identification came later, partly from Psalm 72:10-11 ('May the kings of Tarshish and of distant shores bring tribute to him... may all kings bow down to him') - but as astronomers or astrologers from 'the East,' most likely Persia or Babylon. Their journey has been calculated to last months or possibly years after the birth, which is why Matthew places the family in a house (Matthew 2:11) rather than the stable of Luke's narrative. The star that guided them, whatever its astronomical nature, is portrayed as an active agent - it goes before them and stops over the place where the child was (Matthew 2:9).
The three gifts - gold, frankincense, and myrrh - were freighted with symbolic meaning that the patristic tradition made explicit: gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for burial. The gifts thus announce in their symbolic vocabulary what the Gospel will take twenty-eight chapters to narrate: here is the royal priest who will die. Doré's composition places the gifts in the foreground, visible to the viewer, the connection between the infant in Mary's arms and the death-associated myrrh already established for any theologically attentive observer.
The political subplot of Matthew 2 - Herod's inquiry, his murderous plan, the Magi's warned departure by another route - gives the story a darkness that the Epiphany imagery tends to suppress. The arrival of foreign astronomers in Jerusalem asking 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?' (Matthew 2:2) is immediately political: there is already a king of the Jews, and his name is Herod, and the question of a rival king disturbs not only him but 'all Jerusalem with him' (Matthew 2:3). Doré's stable scene is preceded by this political threat, which is what makes the Magi's journey not merely a spiritual pilgrimage but a narrative of two kingdoms in confrontation.
For Victorian Epiphany celebrations, Doré's image carried the full weight of the season's theological meaning: Christ revealed to all nations, the Gentile world represented in the persons of the kneeling wise men, the universality of the Incarnation made visible in the contrast between eastern robes and eastern camels and a Palestinian stable. The image appeared on Epiphany cards, in Christmas-Epiphany devotional volumes, and in illustrated sermons throughout the latter 19th century as the definitive visualization of the world's homage to the newborn king.