Angel

When this small picture turned up on the Florentine art market in 1821, it was sold as a portrait of a young man by Raphael. Everything that gave it away had been buried under a thick layer of dark varnish so that it could pass as a finished work in its own right: the start of a wing, part of a book, a moulded pillar behind the figure. The Brescian collector Count Paolo Tosio bought it with a certificate of authenticity from the Florence Academy, and it later passed to the city with the rest of his collection. Only in 1912 did the Raphael scholar Oskar Fischel recognise the face of the first angel on the left of the Baronci Altarpiece, the Coronation of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino that the 17-year-old Raphael and the older painter Evangelista da Pian di Meleto had agreed to paint in 1500 for the church of Sant'Agostino in Città di Castello. An earthquake wrecked that church in 1789, and the least damaged parts of the altarpiece were cut down and taken to Rome on the orders of Pope Pius VI. When the dark varnish was cleaned off after Fischel's identification, the wing came back into view.