Бюст ангела

This small panel comes from Florence in the 1490s, painted in tempera by Filippino Lippi. He had learned his trade in the workshop of Sandro Botticelli, and like Botticelli he gave his faces a soft, slightly melancholy sweetness. An isolated head of an angel like this was almost certainly cut at some point from a larger altarpiece, its best-preserved section saved and framed on its own. Filippino was much in demand across Italy in these years, called to Rome and back to Florence for major chapel commissions. What survives here is just the quiet face and downturned gaze of one attendant angel, lifted out of whatever crowded holy scene it once belonged to.