Angel with Portative Organ

Cristoforo Cortese's Angel with Portative Organ, dated around 1401 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a panel from a polyptych altarpiece that has been disassembled, leaving the individual angels as separate works. Cortese was a Venetian painter and illuminator whose work bridges the transition from the late Trecento to the International Gothic style that dominated the early fifteenth century. The portative organ — a small, portable pipe organ played with one hand while the other operated bellows — was a standard angelic attribute in paintings of heavenly music, and such musician-angel panels were produced in large numbers for altarpieces across northern Italy.

Cortese renders the angel with the characteristic decorative elegance of Venetian International Gothic: elaborately tooled gold ground, richly colored robes, and delicate facial features. The portative organ is depicted with evident interest in its mechanical detail. Wing feathers are painted individually with varied warm and cool tones.