Angelo con tamburello

This angel is a piece of something larger. It was cut out of an altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Ferrara in 1613, and the church itself was pulled down 20 years after that, in 1633, so nothing of its setting survives. Titian was at the very start of his career when he painted it, close in handling to the Tobias and the Angel of about 1508, and the Ferrara commission came from the Trotti, one of the families with an altar in that church. A study published in 2022 proposed the missing part. A badly damaged Madonna and Child enthroned, in the Hermitage until 1924 and now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, appears to be the upper section. Set one above the other, the folds of the Madonna's cloak that infrared reveals run straight on into the panel with the angel.