The Mentor: Angels in Art, Vol. 1, Num. 40

By JOHN C. VAN DYKE
Professor of the History of Art, Rutgers College
THE MENTOR
SERIAL No. 40
DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS
Paint an angel! exclaimed Courbet (koor-bay´) the realist to a pupil who one day asked him how it should be done. When did you ever see an angel? The abashed pupil had to admit that he had never had the good fortune to see one. Very well, then, you had better paint the portrait of your grandfather, whom you see every day. The advice to keep his head out of the clouds while his feet were on earth may have been needed by the pupil; but nevertheless angels have been painted time out of mind, and even such pronounced realists as Courbet and Manet (mah-nay´) have painted them. And they saw them, too; that is, they saw the pretty-faced models they turned into angels by adding enlarged pigeon wings to their shoulder blades. But they were not very spiritual angels. Realism rather scorns things spiritual, and besides religious feeling and sentiment in art passed out several centuries before the coming of the modern realists.
The early men—the Fra Angelicos, the Benozzos (ben-ots-o), the Filippinos, of the fifteenth century—believed in the Biblical scenes they painted, and sometimes stated their belief in letters of gold at the bottom of their pictures. They saw things with the eye of faith,—saw Madonnas, saints, and angels in visions, and painted them, as the evangelists wrote, by the aid of inspiration. Perhaps it was their belief, their intense feeling, that gave the fine religious sentiment to the work of these early men. Yet they did not invent or discover the angel in art. It had a more mate rial and commonplace origin than in medieval belief and religious fervor.
PERUGINO: BAPTISM OF CHRIST (detail)
There were winged figures in Egyptian, Chaldean, and Assyrian art, deities of the air, goddesses of the cloud and the heavens. The Hittite and the Persian produced the winged Sphinx, and the Greek the winged Victory that flew above the advancing host and pointed the way to glory. This winged Victory of the Greeks probably suggested the Christian angel; though the immediate forerunner of the angel was found in the Cupid and Psyche of Roman art. The Christians, following the Romans, took over in their art much of the material of the old Roman world. They had to do this; for Christianity was without form in art, and the early Christians decried it as idolatrous. But later on there came a demand for telling the Bible stories in form and color, that people might see what they could not read. Then Christianity, answering the demand, took up Roman forms and gave them Christian significance. They took the Cupids of Roman art and turned them into Cherubs, and out of the winged Victories and Psyches they made ministering angels.