Altarpiece depicting the Guardian Angel (Archangel Raphael and Tobiolo)

Historical setting: Neapolitan school of the first half of the 17th century

Technique: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 113 x 77 cm, in antique frame 123 x 87 cm.

Provenance: Private collection, Florence

We are pleased to offer this fine painting, depicting the Archangel Raphael protecting the young Tobiolo with his great wings, a seventeenth-century jewel of unmistakable Neapolitan Baroque.

Thanks to careful examination of the relevant details and stylistic features, including the power of the chiaroscuro contrasts and the emotional charature of the characters as well as the vigorous rendering of the fabrics of the robes, it was easy to attribute its execution to Onofrio Palumbo, a pupil and then longtime collaborator of the supreme painter Artemisia Gentileschi, during the latter's stay in Naples from 1630 onward.

This is an interesting artist, adherent to the art of Massimo Stanzione and more generally to the current of Caravaggism, who in recent decades has received both critical and collectors' recognition in more ways than one, thanks to the contribution of authoritative historians who have delved into his work.

After a very early training that took place in Battistello Caracciolo's workshop, the painter later adhered to the innovations introduced by Artemisia Gentileschi and was influenced by the painting of Massimo Stanzione, as evidenced by his most important work.

The work, of great character and excellent quality, has as its subject the Archangel Raphael as he protects and shows the right path to the young boy Tobiolo: the meaning of such iconography took on a broader significance over time, eventually becoming the emblem of the human soul protected by its guardian angel.

The canvas, which was certainly set in an altar of a private chapel, is distinguished by a particularly powerful, solemn, and spectacular Baroque language.

The angel embraces and draws the child close to him as a protective sign, while with the other he shows him the sky, made up of clouds charged with intense glow, with plays of light, in full Baroque style: this sky, which exudes a strong sense of drama, is counterbalanced by the beauty of the angel, his milky complexion, however marked by a vivid dynamism that gives even more movement to the painting, and the tenderness of the child who looks at him intensely.

The iconography of the canvas finds correspondences, both of prototype and pictorial quality, with the Guardian Angel in the Onofri collection in Rome (see detail photo), which, at first rightly placed in the artistic milieu revolving around Artemisia Gentileschi, during the years when she was engaged on the canvases of the Cathedral of Pozzuoli Cathedral, was later assigned to Onofrio Palumbo, a collaborator of the same painter.

The conservation condition of the work appears excellent, embellished with an antique frame, also in good condition.