Spinello Aretino, Saint Michael and Other Angels

These three paintings are fragments of a much larger work in fresco, a technique that involved painting directly onto wet plaster. The whole image showed the fall of Lucifer, the rebel angel whose pride caused him to be cast out of heaven. He was often associated with the devil in Christian thought.

The fresco, by Spinello Aretino, decorated a wall in the church of the confraternity of Sant'Angelo, Arezzo, which was also known as the Chiesa del Diavoli. Its original appearance is recorded in engravings and drawings made in the nineteenth century.

The large fragment shows Saint Michael the Archangel ready to strike the devil, while two smaller ones come from the border of the work and show a band of figures set within decorative shapes. They were purchased in 1855 by the archaeologist and explorer Austen Henry Layard, who presented them to the National Gallery in 1886, when he was a trustee. Layard was a founder of the Arundel Society, which aimed to document frescoes in Italian churches and palaces through drawings and art-historical descriptions.