The Guardian Angel

In 1608 Pope Paul V allowed a new feast into the Church's calendar, a day for the guardian angels, the personal angel every Christian was taught to have watching over them. For the time being it was optional, and only in 1670 did another pope make it binding on the whole Church. This canvas belongs to those first decades of the devotion, and it is big, nearly three metres tall. The angel stands on a cloud and points upward while sheltering a small boy, and at the left a demon lurks.

The Louvre suggests, with a question mark, that Fetti painted it for the chapel of the Guardian Angel in the ducal palace at Mantua, where he was court painter. Its later life is better documented. It belonged to Everhard Jabach, a banker and collector in Paris, who sold it to Louis XIV in 1662. At Versailles it hung first in the queen's apartment and later in the Salon de Diane, one of the state rooms of the king's grand apartment, before it was brought back to the Louvre in 1797.