Adoring Angel, Looking Right

This angel and its partner, turned the other way in the same room, seem to come from a ciborium, a small shrine for the consecrated bread of the Mass. In the Louvre's reconstruction a tabernacle ringed by six painted angels stood at the centre, with a figure of Christ blessing above it, now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and these two angels at the sides, turned in toward it. A chronicle of 1551 records such a ciborium by Fra Angelico in the sacristy of San Domenico at Fiesole, and the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari described it in 1568 on the high altar. Its pointed top is lost, the gold is cracked, and the edges were already damaged around 1875. A patch of blue at the upper left may be the robe of yet another angel.