This beautiful and emotionally intense pair of highly finished terracotta angels was clearly made for presentation to a potential client, in preparation for a commission, probably to be executed in marble.The style is undoubtedly Roman and suggests a sculptor in the first or second generation of followers of Bernini and Algardi. The angels’ poses of loving adoration – even their respective praying and folded hands – recall those of the locus classicus for such angels, the splendid pair in gilt-bronze made by Bernini for the Cappella del Santissimo Sacramento off the right aisle of St Peter’s, Rome, of 1675.

Their intended size when finished can be calculated quite precisely from the scale carefully incised along the upper edge of the angel to the viewer’s right. Assuming this to be in Roman palmi (‘hand-spans’), their width at that point would be 67 cm, and the height of the angels themselves (without the pedestal) about twice that, nearly five feet. They must therefore have been models for monumental statues.

The most likely author of the statues presented here was Francesco Moratti (whose surname was spelt in various ways). Moratti came from Padua, where he was a pupil of the Genoese sculptor Filippo Parodi. According to a contemporary biographer, they fell out because Parodi feared Moratti’s competition, and so the promising young sculptor left for Rome around 1690.