His lineaments divine: the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling o’er his breast
With regal ornament; the middle pair
Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round
Skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold
And colours dipp’d in heaven; the third his feet
Shadow’d from either heel with feather’d mail,
Sky-tinctured grain.
I have sometimes thought that Milton, in his descriptions of angels, was not indebted merely to the notions of the old theological writers, interpreted and embellished by his own fancy: may he not, in his wanderings through Italy, have beheld with kindling sympathy some of those glorious creations of Italian Art, which, when I saw them, made me break out into his own divine language as the only fit utterance to express those forms in words?—But, to return—Is it not a mistake to make the wings, the feathered appendages of the angelic form, as like as possible to real wings—the wings of storks, or the wings of swans, or herons, borrowed for the occasion? Some modern painters, anxious to make wings look ‘natural,’ have done this; Delaroche, for instance, in his St. Cecilia. Infinitely more beautiful and consistent are the nondescript wings which the early painters gave their angels:—large—so large, that when the glorious creature is represented as at rest, they droop from the shoulders to the ground; with long slender feathers, eyed sometimes like the peacock’s train, bedropped with gold like the pheasant’s breast, tinted with azure and violet and crimson, ‘colours dipp’d in heaven,’—they are really angel-wings, not bird-wings.
