세라피노

On 11 March 1944 Allied bombs hit the church of the Eremitani in Padua and brought down the Ovetari Chapel, frescoed between 1448 and 1457 by Mantegna and several other painters. Two scenes had been cut from the wall back in the 1880s and kept elsewhere, and those came through intact. Of everything else there are only fragments, and this seraph is one of them. Mantegna painted it around 1449 or 1450, when he was about 18 and still sharing the chapel with older men. The angel is shown from the chest up inside an oval frame, in a loose white shirt, with two red wings, a halo and a torch in one hand. Thousands of pieces were gathered from the rubble and fitted back together with computer help, and the chapel reopened in 2006. The scenes that were destroyed outright are known now only from photographs taken before the war.