Head Of An Angel, After Raphael

Circa 1835 Art Nouveau frame in wood and gilded stucco with floral motifs of water lilies. Articulated portfolio mounting, beveled passe-partout in CC preservation, wine red, added golden threads and ink threads. Anti-reflective glass. If the paternity of our angel certainly goes to a French artist belonging to the Nazarene current of the first half of the 19th century, our study is more particularly close to another head of an angel (Ill.1) attributed to Émile Signol, preparatory to a decorating project. The writing blurred with black chalk makes our drawing a fleshy work filled with enthusiasm and revealing the sources of inspiration of the artist drawn from the Vatican rooms of Raphael, of which our angel constitutes a resumption of that located on the left of the celestial register (Ill.2). Aged twenty-six, Émile Signol won the first Prix de Rome in 1830. During these five years in Italy, the artist allowed himself to be captivated by Fra-Angelesque primitivism and Raphaelesque gentleness as well as by the colorist audacity of the Mannerists. The artist also went to Florence in 1833 in order to make his fourth year copy after the frescoes by Andrea del Sarto, painted in the cloister of the Church of the Holy Annunciation. It was on his return from Rome that he began a work as daunting as it was esoteric, whose formal perfection blends with a surprising chromatic palette made up of pastel and acid notes (Ill.1). If the style of the figures is deliberately archaic, the singular modeling of the faces is strictly of its time. The graciousness of his line and the pedagogy of his compositions here embody the whole Catholic dimension of his work. Illustrating the ideological concerns in vogue during the reign of Louis-Philippe, the Nazarene painters offered French painting a deep religious renaissance which was largely theorized by Count Charles de Montalembert. Praised by conservatives, its proximity to the masters of the past and its numerous references to Gothic painting were considered "regressive" by republican currents. Émile Signol nevertheless knew how to go beyond conventions and overcome the Manichean discord opposing linearists to colourists, idealists to romantics, spiritualists to humanists. Reconciling, his work is deeply innovative, with a refined eclecticism whose iconographic singularity renews the traditional Gospel scenes, reconciling Ingres to the Angelico, combining the Greco-Roman sensitivity of the first to the Christian spirituality of the second.