Giuseppe Angeli

Venetian, 1712 - 1798

Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike License

Italian painter (18th century)

Explore Selected Works

Giuseppe Angeli, An Elderly Bishop, c. 1750, black, white, and red chalks on light brown laid paper, Bequest of Lore Heinemann in memory of her husband, Dr. Rudolf J. Heinemann, 1997.57.3

An Elderly Bishop

Giuseppe Angeli · c. 1750 · black, white, and red chalks on light brown laid paper ·  Accession ID  1997.57.3

An elderly man kneels and leans back with his arms spread wide as he gazes up at another older man sitting in a chariot made of flames and pulled by white horses, which are held aloft by fawn-brown, puffy clouds, in this horizontal painting. Both men have pale skin and are partially bald with full beards. To our left, the kneeling man is mostly turned away from us, so we see the back of his ash-blond hair, a deeply furrowed brow, and a hooked nose. His head tips back and his mouth hangs open. He wears a long, mahogany-brown robe with a flax-yellow mantle draped over his left shoulder. One bare foot emerges from under the hem of the robe so we see the bottom of his foot, and his toes dig into the rock on which he kneels. The rock is painted with strokes of amber brown and sage, olive, and pine green, and it slopes down to a blue-green sea in the lower right corner of the painting. The man in the chariot, Elijah, is positioned across from the first man, to our right. With his body facing the kneeling man, Elijah turns his head to look up to the light streaming in from the upper left corner. Elijah’s right hand, on our left, grasps the white mantle wrapped around his tan robe, while the other hand extends to our right with fingers spread wide. A gold, spoked chariot wheel sits below that hand, facing us. Pale coral-peach flames curl around the wheel and flicker around Elijah’s legs. The flames continue to our left, blending into the bodies of the two muscular, white horses who climb the bank of sand-colored clouds that support the entire chariot. Each corner of the canvas has an inward curving, burnt-orange form, like mounting corners holding a photograph in an album.
Giuseppe Angeli, Elijah Taken Up in a Chariot of Fire, c. 1740/1755, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.70

Elijah Taken Up in a Chariot of Fire

Giuseppe Angeli · c. 1740/1755 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1952.5.70

Bibliography

1980

  • Pilo, Giuseppe Maria. "Giuseppe Angeli e le pubbliche istituzioni d'assistenza a Venezia nel Settecento." Paragone 31, no. 363 (1980): 47-51.

1982

  • Mollenhauer, Mariana. Giuseppe Angeli und die Venezianische Malerei des Settecento. Ph.D. diss., Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1982. Published Bonn, 1986.

1983

  • Pignatti, Terisio. "Giuseppe Angeli." In Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Il suo tempo, la sua scuola. Exh. cat. Palazzo Loredan-Vendramin-Calergi, Venice, 1983: 146-152.

1996

  • De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson, with Edgar Peters Bowron, Peter M. Lukehart, and Mitchell Merling. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 3.