Simbolo dell'Evangelista Matteo (angelo)

The winged young man here is an emblem. In Christian tradition each of the four gospel writers carries a symbol, and the angel belongs to Matthew. Titian painted him around 1542 as one of a set of round panels of the Evangelists and the Doctors of the Church, foreshortened so they would read from below. The surprise is the building around them. Santa Maria della Salute, the great domed church at the mouth of Venice's Grand Canal, went up much later, raised as the city's thanks after the plague of 1630 and 1631 killed close to a third of all Venetians. Titian's panels, made almost 90 years before that church existed, were gathered into its sacristy. Titian himself would die in a later Venetian plague, in 1576.