This work, which came from the Wurts collection (W 1187), depicts an angel without wings (it forms a pair with another work identified by the inv. no. PV 7976/1, which is slightly different in the facial expression and the dress), holding a long drape in front of itself, a little crumpled in the upper part and with a hem at the bottom. Its eyes are closed, and the sweet face, slightly leaning to one side, is framed by soft curls that are held by a band on the front. Santangelo (1954) likened it to the works of Hans Multscher of Ulm (Algäu 1400 ca. – Ulm 1467), who worked a lot in Alto Adige, realizing angels of the same type in the wooden altar for the parish of the Vipiteno/Sterzing (cfr. J. Weingartner, Die Kunstdenkmäler Südtirols, Bozen-Innsbruck 1923, vol. I, fig. 29); indeed he compared them to three other angels in the Museum of Nuremberg, with which they would form, in fact, a series. The angel is sculpted in bass-relief and comes from an altar, inserted into a composition whose subject it is difficult to surmise, and shows stylistic characteristics that are very close to those of the angel playing the psalter, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and is attributed to a sculptor from the valley of the Rhine, between 1460 and 1480. The sculpture, whose polychromy is almost all lost, is broken in two at the hip of the angel. Technical-scientific analyses conducted in 2009 at IVALSA-CNR in Florence identified the wood used as the tilia tree (Tilia sp.). 

 

Grazia Maria Fachechi