Angel

Raphael was about 17 when he took on this job, and it was his first on his own. In 1500 he and a partner contracted to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in Citta di Castello, a small town near his native Urbino, honouring Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. It was finished the next year. Then, in 1789, an earthquake tore the church apart and shattered the picture. Rather than lose it entirely, someone sawed the surviving passages out of the wreck, and the fragments went their separate ways, this angel's head to Brescia, others to Naples and Paris. So what hangs here is a rescued scrap: a young angel looking upward, painted by a teenager still working in the soft, sweet manner of his teacher Perugino.