Angels making music

Previously unrecorded, this detached fresco was painted to decorate a chapel wall from which three other comparably sized fragments have been identified. Like the present painting, those works show music-making angels painted in a pastel palette dominated by lavender and soft greens and embellished with delicate gilding. The presence of the gilding in conjunction with the highly refined execution of the figures suggests the chapel decoration must have been commissioned from an accomplished Milanese artist for a wealthy and discerning patron. Of the three other known fragments from what must once have been a charming cycle, one is only known to scholars from a photograph in the Witt Library, London, where it was listed as by “Luini” and in the collection of Thomas P. Grange. A second was sold in These Rooms on 25 January 2012, lot 2 ($134,500) and a third at Phillips, London, 6 July 1999, lot 70 (£72,000). These latter two works were offered with the attribution “Circle of Bernardino Luini”, and all can be compared to Luini’s fresco cycle of c. 1520/1522 showing The Story of Procris and Cephalus (National Gallery of Art, Washington). The elegant physiognomies of the angels, who epitomize sweetness and grace, would have been very much at home in the contemporary Lombard ideal of beauty, shaped over the course of the preceding generation by Leonardo da Vinci.