Archangel St Michael

Bartolomeo della Gatta's Archangel St Michael, painted around 1480 and now in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Castiglion Fiorentino, depicts the warrior archangel who leads the heavenly host in the battle against Satan and who weighs the souls of the dead at the Last Judgment — making him among the most important and dramatically represented figures in Christian angelic iconography. Michael was the patron saint of soldiers, police, and the sick, and his image appeared in innumerable altarpieces across Italy as both a devotional subject and a statement of communal or military patronage. Della Gatta, the Camaldolese monk-painter who worked across Tuscany and Umbria, produced this image for the same ecclesiastical context in Castiglion Fiorentino as his Stigmata of St Francis panel in the same collection. The two panels together represent the most significant ensemble of della Gatta's work preserved in one location outside the major Tuscan museum collections.

Della Gatta renders Michael in full armor, wings spread, sword raised or scales in hand, with the energetic figural presence that characterizes this artist's best work. The precise miniaturistic handling of armor detail and feather texture reflects his illuminator's training, while the Umbrian landscape setting gives the archangel's figure spatial context and atmospheric depth.