Orcagna’s angels in the Campo Santo are, in this respect, peculiarly poetical. Their extremities are wings instead of limbs; and in a few of the old Italian and German painters of the fifteenth century we find angels whose extremities are formed of light waving folds of pale rose-coloured or azure drapery, or of a sort of vapoury cloud, or, in some instances, of flames. The cherubim and seraphim which surround the similitude of Jehovah when He appears to Moses in the burning bush,[26] are an example of the sublime and poetical significance which may be given to this kind of treatment. They have heads and human features marvellous for intelligence and beauty; their hair, their wings, their limbs, end in lambent fires; they are ‘celestial Ardours bright,’ which seem to have being without shape.
Dante’s angels have less of dramatic reality, less of the aggrandised and idealised human presence, than Milton’s. They are wondrous creatures. Some of them have the quaint fantastic picturesqueness of old Italian Art and the Albert Dürer school; for instance, those in the Purgatorio, with their wings of a bright green, and their green draperies, ‘verde come fogliette,’ kept in a perpetual state of undulation by the breeze created by the fanning of their wings, with features too dazzling to be distinguished:
Ben discerneva in lor la testa bionda,
Ma nelle facce l’ occhio si smarria
Come virtù ch’ a troppo si confonda.[27]
And the Shape, glowing red as in a furnace, with an air from the fanning of its wings, ‘fresh as the first breath of wind in a May morning, and fragrant as all its flowers.’ That these and other passages scattered through the Purgatorio and the Paradiso assisted the fancy of the earlier painters, in portraying their angelic Glories and winged Beatitudes, I have little doubt; but, on the other hand, the sublime angel in the Inferno—he who comes speeding over the waters with vast pinions like sails, sweeping the evil spirits in heaps before him, ‘like frogs before a serpent,’ and with a touch of his wand making the gates of the city of Dis fly open; then, with a countenance solemn and majestic, and quite unmindful of his worshipper, as one occupied by higher matters, turning and soaring away—this is quite in the sentiment of the grand old Greek and Italian mosaics, which preceded Dante by some centuries.[28]
But besides being the winged messengers of God to man, the deputed regents of the stars, the rulers of the elements, and the dispensers of the fate of nations, angels have another function in which we love to contemplate them. They are the choristers of heaven. Theirs is the privilege to sound that hymn of praise which goes up from this boundless and harmonious universe of suns and stars and worlds and rejoicing creatures, towards the God who created them: theirs is the music of the spheres—