Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Where an evangelist and an angel actually meet
Thirty-three titles in this catalogue contain the word evangelist, and nearly all of them are false positives. This one is not. Matthew's symbol in the tetramorph is a winged man, routinely painted as an angel, and the title names both the evangelist and the angel as separate presences. It is the point where the homonym and the subject genuinely coincide.
What the record holds
The catalogue dates the work to 1640 and gives Guido Reni, a Italian painter, with Baroque as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour families are red and yellow. The location on record is Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican.
A symbol is not a member of the hierarchy
The distinction still holds. The winged man of the tetramorph is an emblem attached to a gospel writer, not an inhabitant of the nine orders; the other three evangelists get a lion, an ox and an eagle, and no one supposes those to be celestial beings either. So an entry like this belongs in an angels catalogue by convention and by title, while the reason it belongs is a different one from Gabriel's or Michael's. No dimensions are given in the record.
Sources
3 references- Reni, Guido — Getty ULAN
Italian painter, draftsman, 1575-1642
- Guido Reni — Wikipedia
Guido Reni (Italian pronunciation: [ˈɡwiːdo ˈrɛːni]; 4 November 1575 – 18 August 1642) was an Italian Baroque painter, although his works showed a classical manner, similar to Simon Vouet, Nicolas Poussin, and Philippe de Champaigne. He pai
- Guido Reni - St Matthew and the Angel - WGA19308 — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
