Angel (Right Hand)

This flying angel comes from a pala (an altarpiece with a single, unified surface) which was sawn into pieces in the eighteenth century, but reassembled by the National Gallery in the 1930s. In raking light you can see the joins where the parts have been stuck together.The altarpiece was made for a confraternity of priests in Pistoia, and shows the Trinity (God the Father, Christ and the Holy Ghost as a dove) with saints and angels. It was begun by one artist, Francesco Pesellino, and finished by another, Fra Filippo Lippi, when Pesellino died leaving it half finished.Two angels hover on either side of the Trinity – this one is on the right – with their draperies and ribbons flapping around them: they're clearly beating their wings hard to stay aloft. These figures seem to have been completed by Pesellino, rather than Lippi. We can see how he was moving away from the graceful style he inherited from Fra Angelico towards a more dynamic way of depicting figures. He also seems to have developed a greater interest in how bodies work in space. Both angels hang horizontally in the air, looking down at the Cross, their heads and bodies foreshortened. This one is shown angled towards us, while the other – on the left – is angled away.This fragment is more damaged than the angel opposite it and has been more drastically cleaned in the past. The angel’s pink robe has faded dramatically and parts of the flying blue ribbons have been repainted. Much of the underdrawing (the preliminary outlining of a composition) is now visible, especially in the pink drapery.