Various sculptors, Six musician angels
- Authors
- Guidi, Jacopo di Piero - Luca di Giovanni da Siena - Piero di Giovanni Tedesco
- Date
- 1383-1388
- Collocation
- Sala del Paradiso
- Original location
- Cathedral, medieval facade
- Material
- White marble
- Technique
- Sculpture
- Scientific catalog (only in italian)
- Sei angeli musicanti dalla facciata
Refined group of white marble statues, depicting six musician angels, sculpted in the 1380s by Jacopo di Piero Guidi, Luca di Giovanni da Siena and Piero di Giovanni Tedesco to decorate the sides of the central portal of the first facade of the Cathedral. Once the facade was dismantled in 1587, these sculptures were dispersed. The group was originally composed of at least eight angels: These six were reused in the garden of the Medici Villa of Castello and arrived at the Museum in 1936, while a seventh angel, a harp player, is today at the Bode Museum in Berlin. The angels, of ephebic beauty and regal elegance in their poses and shapes, typically late Gothic, give life, some with a joyful expression and some in abstract contemplation, to a celestial concert, each a different musical instrument: cymbals, bagpipes, rebec, lute, organ portative and viella. Certainly the iconography takes up Psalm 150, where we are invited to praise God ”with the sounding of the trumpet,...with the harp and lyre,...with timbrel and dancing,...with the strings and pipe,...with the clash of cymbals,...with resounding cymbals.”