An Angel Adoring

An Angel Adoring (1495), at the National Gallery in London, is likely a fragment of a larger altarpiece or devotional composition in which the angel appeared as one of several adoring figures surrounding a central holy subject. Single-angel panels sometimes survive as independent works when larger polyptychs were dismembered in later centuries. Lippi's angels are among the most distinctive in Italian Renaissance painting: they have a specific physical presence, slightly languid, with flower-wreathed hair and absorbed expressions, that sets them apart from the more robustly heavenly angels of his Florentine contemporaries.

The single-figure format concentrates attention on the angel's pose of adoration — hands clasped, body inclined forward — and on the quality of Lippi's rendering of celestial youth. His handling of the wings, with their careful attention to individual feathers and their iridescent colour, is characteristically meticulous.