Draped Angel, Hands Clasped

Twentieth century leather frame gilded with small iron. Anti-reflective Clarity glass, hinged portfolio mounting, beveled master key in CC wine red conservation, ivory conservation undercard, added gold lines and ink lines. Extremely fine and immensely delicate, the meticulous line draping this figure of an angel in prayer adopts the symbolic language of a deep faith due to the hand of an artist belonging to the Nazarene current, born in Europe in the 1800s. Driven by a return to primitive Italian artistic sources, these painters worked to purify a religious iconography still tinged with naked neo-classical figures and profane cherubs mutineers. They are replaced, like our angel, by "chaste adolescents with large cut-out wings most of the time dressed in liturgical ornaments offering our wishes and praying for us, fulfilling a kind of priestly ministry towards us" according to the beautiful words of Abbé Van Drival published in 1866 in an article entitled L'Iconographie des anges, and appeared in Volume X (p. 442) of La Revue de l'art Chrétien. Our angel refers to the stylistic characteristics of the angelic figures of a Fra Angelico (1395-1455) with his frescoes in the Convent of San Marco in Florence or of a Buonamico Buffalmacco (1262-1304) in Campo Santo in Pisa. Our drawing, with a nineteenth-century twist, was probably made by an artist close to the entourage of Émile Signol (1804-1892), in particular the draperies of the angels in Le Réveil du just; awakening of the wicked (1835), oil on canvas, preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers, by Amaury-Duval (1808-1885) for the angelic choirs surrounding the Coronation of the Virgin (1846) at Saint-Germain l' Auxerrois as well as his Virgin in Glory (1856) from the eponymous chapel in Saint-Germain en Laye, or by Louis-Marie Charles de Bodin, known as the Count of Galembert (1813-1897).