Cherub

A winged head in oil-painted flesh tones, wings polychromed in blue and green, hair water-gilded. It is a retable fragment: in eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian altarpieces, cherubs like this crowd the archivolts, the crestings and the flanks, in pairs or in clusters, set among scrolls and vines.

The encarnado — the painting of the flesh — was the last and most delicate operation of the trade, entrusted to a painter rather than the carver. Here it is burnished: the thinnest layers of oil over gesso, polished until they take on the sheen of skin. It is by that finish that a good workshop is recognised.