Saint Matthew and the Angel

Simone Cantarini

National Gallery of Art

A bearded man holds and looks down at an open book as a winged angel holds a feather pen and an inkwell in this vertical painting. Both are shown from the waist up against a peanut-brown background, and both have pale skin. The man’s body faces us, though his shoulders are angled slightly to our left. He is balding, with a rim of gray, curly hair, and a full, grayish-white beard. His forehead is heavily wrinkled, and there are hollows under his high cheekbones. A marine-blue cloth drapes across his shoulders over a brick-red garment. He braces the book with one hand so the fingers hook over the top edge of the pages. He lifts a section of a few pages with the other hand, and there is black writing on the white pages. The angel stands facing away from us so we look onto the back of the ear and side of the left cheek. The angel’s long blond hair is braided into two plaits and wound around the sides and top of the head, where they are tied with a red bow. The angel wears a bodice with a square neckline, and the puffy white sleeve we see is gathered at the elbow. The wings are snowy white. The tip of the white feather pen rests in the shallow, hockey puck-shaped inkwell held in the left hand.