An Angel seated on a Cloud and playing the Violin

Andrea Lilio’s entire career was spent between Rome and his native Ancona. The present study has been convincingly connected with one of Lilio’s altarpieces, the Coronation of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, painted for the church of Sant’Agostino in Ancona. The work survives today in four fragments in the local Pinacoteca (Pulini, op. cit., no. 59, ill.). One of the fragments of the altarpiece contains a panoramic view of the port of Ancona (fig. 1) with, near the upper right corner, the feet and some parts of the red garment of a figure seated on clouds (ibid., no. 59, ill.). The feet precisely correspond with those of the angel in the present drawing, who originally appeared in the upper portion of the altarpiece playing the violin in the sky above the city. The painting is signed and dated 1598.

The present sheet can be compared stylistically with a squared drawing of three music-making angels by Lilio in the Louvre (inv. RF 44312). Likewise drawn in black chalk on blue paper, the Louvre sheet is the study for the upper part of an altarpiece of Saints John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, Bernardino of Siena and Paul Adoring the Cross, painted in the 1590s for San Francesco in Ancona and now in the Pinacoteca Civica there. The pose of the angel in this drawing is similar to that of the central angel playing a violin in the Ancona painting.