2a. Procession of the Queen of Sheba

According to the legend, the tree grown from Adam’s grave stood and prospered into the time of Solomon, who had it cut down so he could use it in building a house. As it happened, the wood was not suitable for this purpose, so his workers laid the hewn log across a stream to serve as a bridge. As the Queen of Sheba passed by on her visit to the wise Solomon, she came to the bridge and foresaw that one day the world’s saviour would hang from this beam. She therefore refused to step on it, and instead knelt before it in veneration.

Behind the Queen of Sheba, kneeling in adoration, is her retinue of aristocratic ladies in waiting, with their high foreheads (according to the fashion of the time) emphasizing the round shape of their heads and the cylindrical form of the neck. Their velvet cloaks softly envelop their bodies, reaching all the way to the ground. The almost perfect regularity of the composition is underlined by the two trees in the background, whose leaves hover like umbrellas above the two groups of the women and of the grooms holding the horses. And yet Piero’s constant attention to the regularity of proportions and the construction according to perspective never gives way to artificially sophisticated compositions, schematic symmetries or anything forced.