Date: 28-12-1991
Owning Institution:
Publication:                 The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:     Renaissance  Middle Ages & Earlier  19th Century  18th Century  17th Century  16th Century    

There might be as many as a hundred of them on your mantelpiece and there is, almost certainly, one on top of your tree, but the chances are you haven't taken the time to look at them - to note their differences, their quirks and habits. Angels are just part of the festive scenery: airy, anonymous, almost abstract embellishments to the modern Christmas.
Almost, but not entirely abstract. Angels have a past. To follow the evolution of the angel in art, its vari-ous metamorphoses and eventual extinction, is to see in miniature the fluctuations of the Christian faith, and its gradual decline, in the West. Angels may have be denatured as God's messengers, but they are, still, carriers of fascinating information.

The history of the angel in art is partly a history of the humanisation - the imaginative materialisation - of the supernatural. The idea that divine will requires these intermediaries, winged beings whose forms are half mortal, half supernatural, goes too far back to trace. The word ''angel'' is ancient, derived via Old French and Latin from the Greek ''aggelos'', itself a translation of the Hebrew ''mal'akh'', meaning ''messenger''. The angels we know from art galleries and Christmas cards are descendants of Mercury, the envoy of Jupiter, and of the innumerable winged deities to have preceded him. They demonstrate the close links between pre-Christian and Christian imagery, although, for many people now, even their Christian significance is much diminished.

Nowadays, for instance, we tend to think of angels as being, more or less, all the same. We might be able to tell the difference between an archangel and a cherub - but the finer distinctions between various kinds of angel that might have been recognised by, say, a fourteenth-century churchgoer, tend to be lost on us. The nine kinds (or choirs) of angel, first listed in the fifth century AD by a convert of St Paul called Dionysius the Areopagite are categorised as follows: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Princedoms, Archangels, Angels. The last choir of the last hierarchy has the title ''Angels'', but the generic term ''angel'' applies to the others too. Angels (who are all, incidentally, male) demonstrate that heaven is not quite the classless society it is sometimes made out to be.

Different angels have different jobs. The Cherubim and Seraphim, absorbed in perpetual love and adoration of the Almighty, do not leave His side. The lowest orders of angels, by contrast, the Angels and Archangels are constantly scurrying off to earth to do His bidding. This is reflected in art, although over the centuries artists seem to have become less and less respectful of, and knowledgeable about, the distinctions within the angelic host. Still, there used to be such a thing as the right angel for the right occasion, so it is appropriate that God, in Titian's famous Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari, Venice, should be surrounded by a multitude of Seraphim and Cherubim who bathe in the glow of His divinity.

The early angels of Byzantine art have a stiff, intimidating, almost martial bearing. They are not adoles-cent (like most angels of the early Renaissance), nor childish (like most angels of the Baroque and after), but fully grown. They are impressive but impassive, having the character of emblems. Something of the distant solemnity of the Byzantine angel survives in the figure of Gabriel in Duccio's panel of The Annunciation. By contrast, Filippo Lippi's Gabriel, in his Annunciation of almost 150 years later seems a courtly, courteous, and far more worldly messenger from heaven. Gabriel had only begun to kneel in versions of The Annunciation in the fourteenth century, and later artists like Lippi painted him as a kind of respectful knight from heaven, adopting the stance of courtship popularised by the code of chivalry. A temporary innovation acquired the permanence of a convention.

Angels first became touchingly human in the art of Giotto. Giotto's angels, in the great Lamentation which he painted for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, seem shocking because they react to the death of Christ with such painfully human emotions: they scream, they weep, they wring their hands in anguish. Yet they also retain something of the nature of the old, emblematic angels: it is as if they have been driven beyond the limits of the artistic conventions that framed them, by pain.

Artists have, in general, tended to concentrate on the first and last pair of choirs: the Cherubim and Seraphim; the Archangels and Angels. Why they should have chosen to abbreviate the heavenly host may be deduced from one of the few paintings in which all the choirs of angels are present: Francesco Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin, of around 1475, in the National Gallery. Botticini pictures heaven, here, as a vast architectural dome in the sky, with God just below where a cupola might be, its sides banded with the nine choirs of angels. It is an awful lot to fit into a painting. Heaven, in Botticini's image, ends up occupying nearly the whole canvas.

Relatively early on during the Renaissance, five of Dionysius's choirs - the Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers and Princedoms - had been dropped by most artists. These were, after all, the least interesting of the angels, being neither those closest to God, nor those closest to man.

The angels in Masaccio's Virgin and Child in the National Gallery are sharply individuated and begin to invite those kinds of questions (which two boys sat to the painter? where did he find them?) that tend to complicate perception of them as angels. When angels become more and more palpable, more and more like people, but with wings, it sometimes seems as if they run the risk of forfeiting their angelic stature as a result - and as if Renaissance artists themselves sense that, by painting their angelic models with the same empirical attention which they devote to landscape or architecture, they are in danger of creating heavenly beings that no longer have the sense of heavenly mystery about them.
There is a kind of uneasiness in much later Renaissance sacred art, a creeping doubt about the narrow-ing gap in representation between the holy and the mundane. It may be detected in the art of Raphael. In The Sistine Madonna, he negotiated this problem by pitting one kind of angel against another. In the painting's foreground, propping themselves on their elbows on its stagy parapet, you find a pair of those distinctively urchin-like, mischievous child angels which the Victorians so admired Raphael for. Above them, in the centre of the picture, the Madonna and child are framed against a glowing backdrop whose radiance is peopled by innumerable, tiny cherubs' heads - a kind of backlit angelic cloud, an almost abstract device. It is as if the artist has recognised that some form of retreat from his own accomplished realism is necessary to create a sense of holy transcendence. The paradox of the image is that the artist himself seems much more inter-ested in the angels below, with their naughty altar-boy demeanour, than he is in those above. You can imag-ine him leaving all those tiny heads to an assistant: ''Gone for lunch. Please do the cherubs.''

Titian's baby-thronged mist, in his Annunciation, or the endless fricassees of angelic infants served up by Baroque and Rococo artists, may be said to to demonstrate a similar recognition of the limits of a literal, descriptive language of art when it comes to the depiction of beings as ethereal, as charged with holiness, as angels.

Angels in art are never just the intermediaries of God, but also of artists - the messengers of their origi-nality. To compare the angels in Mantegna's Agony in the Garden with the angel in Bellini's version of the same subject is to measure the gap between the two artists. Mantegna's angels are fitting occupants of his hard, mineral world, a row of stonily realised winged babies perched on a cloud the texture of rock. Bellini's angel, on the other hand, is a radiant, floating being - a creature who seems fashioned from Venetian blown glass, as if the artist has attempted to translate, into the forms of art, that mystical Christian tradition of thought in which the angel is held to be a transparent medium of God's light. Nearly two centuries later, Rembrandt would attempt something similar, omitting the angels altogether from his Adoration and putting in their place, simply, a beam of yellow light.

Every artist has his own angels - Piero della Francesca's are solemn, watching presences, indefinably ambiguous; Caravaggio's are lithe, streetwise, earthbound adolescents - yet for all the variety within it, the history of angels does have a certain consistency. The evolution of the species might be haphazard but it has a direction.

What happens to angels is that they get younger. In fact, they get much younger. They regress con-stantly, over time, so that from (say) Duccio to Murillo their average age drops from about 25 to about two. This cannot merely be explained by the earlier suggestion that artists sought, in the Cherubic mist, an es-cape from their own literalness. What seems to happen, in Western art during and after the Renaissance, might be described as a peculiar rapprochement between sacred and secular painting which results in an altogether new kind of angel. To put it simply, angels start to look like Cupid. And angels start to look like putti, the winged assistants of Cupid. Artists, collapsing the gap between one sort of painting and another, between the profane and the religious, devise a multi-purpose otherworldly figure equally suited to either. The evidence for this is everywhere, in those rooms of the National Gallery given over to the seventeenth century: on one wall you may see Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, attended by Cupid, on another a Murillo saint having visions of tiny winged infants, but the Cupid and the angels look exactly the same. The old hierarchy of angels has almost completely disappeared, to be replaced by a new and uniform type. Angels are gradu-ally homogenised, so that by the period of the Baroque they have acquired the character of a virtually invisible convention - a development in art which may itself mark a dilution of the old Christian faith in heaven as a reality, since it presents angels as beings no longer really known and differentiated between.

The implications of this development are large. Walking through the National Gallery in search of angels, you notice a gradual diminution of their symbolic power. Their meaning, as divine messengers, seems to leak from them and seep into other, more secular kinds of imagery.

When angels became Cupoids, a new kind of religious art was born. It could be spectacular, but it could also be profoundly ambiguous in a way that (for instance) the art of Giotto could not be. A perfect example of this ambiguity might be the High Baroque sculpture of Bernini, where (typically) the angel-cum-Cupid assists a swooning female saint to attain a condition of visionary ecstasy that looks remarkably like orgasm. When angels begin to turn pagan, saints and Madonnas can seem like Venuses and heaven like one vast orgy. After Bernini, the secularisation of the angel gathers pace and can be said to culminate in the jokily profane, semi-sacrilegious mythologies of Boucher and Fragonard. It is not exactly that angels cannot be angels any more, but they cannot be (even in religious art) only and unambiguously angels. They have been soiled by association. Their origins, in heathen mythology and iconography, have come back to haunt them.

This may be why William Blake, one of the last artists to create a new, distinctive and sacred-seeming version of the angelic form, should have avoided the Cupid- putto stereotype. In the V&A's drawing of Angels Hovering over the Body of Christ in the Sepulchre, Blake reinvented the old, distant Byzantine angel in a new form. His mysterious beings, who seem made of liquid or light, are removed both from the mundane world and from the dangerous, sexually charged world of classical mythology. They are quite sexless, these hovering beings, and are doubly armoured by the symmetry of Blake's composition. Their wings touch, forming a Gothic arch. The angel recovers, for a moment, its holiness.

Turner painted an angel, too, although his Angel Standing in the Sun really marks the angel's disap-pearance from art. The standing angel (the Archangel Michael, announcing the Last Judgement) is over-whelmed and almost obliterated by the whirling vortex of light and heat that is Turner's late style. After Turner, in this century, artists with a spiritual bent (like Mark Rothko) have created trembling voids of pure, saturated colour, emptied of figurative reference. These gaping emptinesses are ambiguous, lucid pools in which we see reflected our own religious doubt. They may picture The Void, or simply nothing. Look hard into them, and you might just see an angel. But probably not.