Studies of an Archangel and a Wind God (verso), by Massimo Stanzione, c. 1620s
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Studies of an Archangel and a Wind God (verso)

Massimo Stanzione (Italian, 1585–1656)

c. 1620s

Medium
pen and brown ink (verso),
Classification
Drawing
Dimensions
Sheet: 9.5 x 35.8 cm (3 3/4 x 14 1/8 in.)
Culture
Italy
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
Credit line
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Rights
Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed

View at the Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

Massimo Stanzione worked in the Spanish-held Kingdom of Naples, where, during the 1600s, painting was characterized by dramatic expression, emphatic naturalism, and intense chiaroscuro derived from the profound influence of Caravaggio (1571–1610). Stanzione, however, was known in the city as one of the main purveyors of a more classical style, a kind of antithesis to the passion and drama of such Neapolitan painters as Jusepe de Ribera. This drawing relates directly to a painting Stanzione made depicting the seven archangels at the Monasterio de la Descalzas Reales in Madrid. The iconography of the seven archangels was a regional focus of devotion in the Neapolitan kingdom, and in Spain, where the cult of the “Seven Angelic Princes” had been promoted by the 16th-century Sicilian friar Antonio Del Duca (1491–1564).