The Fall of the Rebel Angels

This Fall of the Rebel Angels at Dulwich Picture Gallery depicts the primordial battle between God's loyal angels and the rebel host that Milton's Paradise Lost had elevated into the central drama of Christian cosmology. The subject required the artist to depict airborne combat on a massive scale, with the triumphant angels driving the rebels downward toward the abyss in a compositional challenge that tested the most ambitious Baroque painters. Ricci's version brings his fluid figure style and luminous palette to this aerial battle, the falling rebels' varied expressions of defeat and despair contrasting with the upward-soaring serenity of the victorious celestial host.

The composition creates a vortex of falling figures, Ricci's dynamic arrangement and dramatic chiaroscuro conveying the violence of the angelic rebellion with the theatrical energy that characterized his most ambitious narrative works.