A Flying Angel (recto); Studies of Hands Playing Instruments (verso) (1723–27): Art, History and Details

A Flying Angel (recto); Studies of Hands Playing Instruments (verso) (1723–27) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing was completed in preparation for the most prestigious religious commission of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s career, the ceiling painting of the Glory of St. Dominic for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Both the finished painting, which depicts St. Dominic’s arrival in heaven amid a thundery vortex, and Piazzetta’s study for the angel, who carries St. Dominic on a cloud, depart from Venetian tradition. To execute this airborne subject, he likely drew from wax or clay models suspended in midair in order to study the illusionistic di sotto in su (from below to above) perspective and the play of light found on the angel’s shadowed form. He worked out the angel’s twisting pose, imbuing it with a lively sense of movement, and accentuated the drapery’s folds with heavy lines as though considering their visibility from afar. There are only slight changes in the angel’s pose between this drawing and the completed painting. As few of Piazzetta’s preparatory studies for paintings exist, Cleveland’s sheet offers rare insight to the artist’s working methods.

Object facts

• Title: A Flying Angel (recto); Studies of Hands Playing Instruments (verso)
• Date: 1723–27
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754)
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk heightened with traces of white chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 56.3 x 42.6 cm (22 3/16 x 16 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1938.388

A detail from the museum

The Venetian blue paper (carta azzurra) of this sheet was the preferred medium for preparatory drawings among artists in Venice at the time this drawing was made.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Cleveland: A Museum’s New Acquisitions.” The Art News 38, no. 40 (1940).
• Millikan, William M. “Two Drawings by Piazzetta.” Burlington Magazine 76, no. 444 (1940).
• Francis, Henry S. "Two Drawings by Piazzetta." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 27, no. 7 (1940): 108-109.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.