An Angel Playing the Lute

This angel is a fragment, cut from a much larger painting. Around 1480 Melozzo painted an Ascension of Christ in the apse of Santi Apostoli, a church in the centre of Rome, with apostles gazing up from below and angels making music around the rising Christ. In 1711 the apse was pulled down when the church was rebuilt, and pieces of the fresco were taken off the wall and saved.

The pieces went separate ways. The figure of Christ was set up in the Quirinal Palace, then a residence of the popes and today of the President of Italy. The Vatican kept 14 fragments of apostles and angels, and they hang together here in this room.

This one plays a lute, the round ribbed back of the instrument turned toward us, under a head of thick blond curls. The rough edges of plaster around him show where the painting was cut from the wall.