L'angelo custode

Tiepolo owed Udine to one family. The Dolfin were patriarchs of Aquileia, the old church province that ran much of Friuli, and they had brought him up from Venice in the 1720s to fresco their palace there. He was still working for them a decade later, when Daniele Dolfin ordered this picture for the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, kept by the Oratorian fathers in the town. The shape tells you where it hung: over two metres high and under one metre across, cut to fit a side altar. An angel leans over a child asleep on white cloth on a hillside, with a lake, a village and mountains behind. Rome abolished the patriarchate of Aquileia in 1751, and when the church itself was closed in 1867 the painting went across town to the castle, where the civic museum has it now.