The Archangel Gabriel

Description This small panel of the Archangel Gabriel was originally one of three "pinnacles" (crowning elements) from the upper section of a large triptych painted in the mid-1480s by Bernardino del Castelletto for the church of San Pietro a Bagnara in Massa, a city on the coast of the Tyrrenhian Sea in central Italy. The main panels of the triptych, now in Massa’s cathedral museum, depict the Virgin and Child flanked by four saints. The Walters panel surmounted the left panel of the triptych, opposite an image of the Virgin (now lost) over the right panel. Together these pinnacles formed an image of the Annunciation, the episode from the Bible in which the Archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary and announces that she will bear the savior of the world. For a triptych with a comparable set of pinnacles, see Walters 37.554.

Conservation

Date	Description	Narrative
1/07/1958	Treatment	coated; other
10/22/1965	Treatment	cleaned; loss compensation; coated
6/25/2004	Examination	examined for condition

Provenance Church of San Pietro in Bagnara, Massa. Don Marcello Massarenti Collection, Rome [date and mode of acquisition unknown] [1897 catalogue: no. 19, as Andrea Verrocchio]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1902, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Credit Acquired by Henry Walters with the Massarenti Collection, 1902