Head of an angel

Koch: Later mannered Italian style. The painting could be from the school of Italian decorative painters who painted the Aschaffenburg and Würzburg palaces, because it comes from the property of Maria's great-grandparents who lived in Aschaffenburg. It was considered in the family to be a Rafael Mengs, which seems impossible to me. The picture has hardly any baroque and not at all any classicistic features, but manneristic ones as they developed in the alienation of the Rafaelian style. It is very carefully painted and the colours are excellently preserved. The characteristic feature of the painting is the strikingly piercing gaze for an angel. The painting is certainly by an Italian, hardly a copy and if so an early one. Oil, square medium format, without glass, old gilded stucco frame.