The Archangel Gabriel, his wings still fiery with colour applied over 1200 years ago, has emerged from beneath the nave of Lichfield Cathedral.
The Anglo-Saxon carved figure was found when builders, watched over by archaeologists, took up part of the floor of the nave to build a new rising platform for concerts and recitals.
"None of us imagined that the project would provide a priceless gem, with the discovery of a carved stone angel that dates back to the original Saxon church that pre-dates the present Cathedral," said the Cathedral's Dean, Adrian Dorbar.
Any Anglo-Saxon figure sculpture is a rare survival, but the discovery of a virtually complete figure, albeit a broken one, with so much of its original painted surface intact, has astonished archaeologists, and is of international importance.
The angel also bears glowing witness to the understanding that the sober white and grey interiors of Europe's historic churches once blazed with colours as lavish as any fairground carousel.
Britain's heritage of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical art and architecture was almost obliterated by the scale and splendour of the Norman rebuilding, and the firestorm of later iconoclasts. Much of what painted decoration survived then fell to the renovating Victorians, and the fallacy that historic churches should have pure bleached stone interiors - a reforming zeal which drove the anguished William Morris to found the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings.
When the Henry Moore Institute recently organised an exhibition on medieval English painted sculpture, some once-common types had to be borrowed from abroad, because not a single example survived in Britain.
The Lichfield angel only survived because it was buried beneath the later building, possibly preserved as a relic of the tomb of St Chad, the cathedral's patron, whose body was reburied in a magnificent eighth-century shrine.
The exquisitely carved limestone figure of the angel, one foot gracefully propped on a sinuous branch breaking into leaf, was found broken into three pieces, but missing only a fold of his robe. It may be the left panel of an Annunciation, but despite extensive excavation, no trace was found of a matching figure of the Virgin Mary.
Most carvings that survived the changing fashions were destroyed during the waves of image smashing following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the many subsequent religious upheavals. Angels in particular were often targeted, and hands and heads destroyed if there was no time to smash the entire figure.
At Southwold in Suffolk, in 1644, William Dowsing recorded: "We brake down 130 superstitious pictures; St Andrew; and four crosses on the four corners of the vestry; and gave orders to take down 13 cherubims; and to take down 20 angels; and to take down the cover of the font."
However, the archaeology suggests that the Lichfield angel was already safely buried by then, when, as in most places, the later much grander Norman cathedral virtually obliterated the Anglo Saxon church.
The angel will go on display at the Cathedral this weekend, before being sent for specialist conservation work.