Saint Matthew and the Angel

Matthew's Gospel opens with the human ancestry of Jesus, a long line of fathers and sons, and for that reason Christian tradition gave Matthew a winged man as his emblem, which painters turned into an angel. Guercino makes the angel a young companion sitting close beside the old evangelist. The boy holds a large book open and points into it, and Matthew swings round to look at him, one hand resting on a second, smaller book.

The picture dates from around 1622, when Guercino was working in Rome, and nobody knows who ordered it. It first appears in 1641, in an inventory of the Pio di Savoia family's collection, and it was still theirs in 1750, when Pope Benedict XIV bought the family's pictures for the new museum on the Capitoline. In 2024 it travelled to Turin for an exhibition about how Guercino worked, and hung there beside a canvas from almost the same moment, Saint Peter Freed by an Angel, lent by the Prado.