Angels of the Planets from the Capella Chigi.
Michael Angelo rarely gave wings to his angels; I scarcely recollect an instance, except the angel in the Annunciation: and his exaggerated human forms, his colossal creatures, in which the idea of power is conveyed through attitude and muscular action, are, to my taste, worse than unpleasing. My admiration for this wonderful man is so profound that I can afford to say this. His angels are superhuman, but hardly angelic: and while in Raphael’s angels we do not feel the want of wings, we feel while looking at those of Michael Angelo that not even the ‘sail-broad vans’ with which Satan laboured through the surging abyss of chaos could suffice to lift those Titanic forms from earth, and sustain them in mid-air. The group of angels over the Last Judgment, flinging their mighty limbs about, and those that surround the descending figure of Christ in the Conversion of St. Paul, may be referred to here as characteristic examples. The angels, blowing their trumpets, puff and strain like so many troopers. Surely this is not angelic: there may be power, great imaginative and artistic power, exhibited in the conception of form, but in the beings themselves there is more of effort than of power: serenity, tranquillity, beatitude, ethereal purity, spiritual grace, are out of the question.
The later followers of his school, in their angelic as in their human forms, caricatured their great master, and became, to an offensive degree, forced, extravagant, and sensual.
When we come to the revival of a better taste under the influence of the Caracci, we find the angels of that school as far removed from the early Christian types as were their apostles and martyrs. They have often great beauty, consummate elegance, but bear the same relation to the religious and ethereal types of the early painters that the angels of Tasso bear to those of Dante. Turn, for instance, to the commencement of the Gerusalemme Liberata, where the angel is deputed to carry to Godfrey the behest of the Supreme Being. The picture of the angel is distinctly and poetically brought before us; he takes to himself a form between boyhood and youth; his waving curls are crowned with beams of light; he puts on a pair of wings of silver tipped with gold, with which he cleaves the air, the clouds, the skies; he alights on Mount Lebanon, and poises himself on his balanced wings—
E si librò su l’ adeguate penne.
This is exactly the angel which figures in the best pictures of the Caracci and Guido: he is supremely elegant, and nothing more.
I must not here venture on minute criticism, as regards distinctive character in the crowds of painters which sprung out of the eclectic school. It would carry us too far; but one or two general remarks will lead the reader’s fancy along the path I would wish him to pursue. I would say, therefore, that the angels of Ludovico have more of sentiment, those of Annibal more of power, those of Guido more of grace: and of Guido it may be said that he excels them all in the expression of adoration and humility; see, for instance, the adoring seraphs in Lord Ellesmere’s ‘Immaculate Conception.’ The angels of Domenichino, Guercino, and Albano, are to me less pleasing. Domenichino’s angels are merely human. I never saw an angel in one of Guercino’s pictures that had not, with the merely human character, a touch of vulgarity. As for Albano, how are we to discriminate between his angels and his nymphs, Apollos, and Cupids? But for the occasion and the appellation, it would be quite impossible to distinguish the Loves that sport round Venus and Adonis, from the Cherubim, so called, that hover above a Nativity or a Riposo; and the little angels, in his Crucifixion, cry so like naughty little boys, that one longs to put them in a corner. This merely heathen grace and merely human sentiment is the general tendency of the whole school; and no beauty of form or colour can, to the feeling and religious mind, redeem such gross violations of propriety. As for Poussin, of whom I think with due reverence, his angels are often exquisitely beautiful and refined: they have a chastity and a moral grace which pleases at first view; but here again the scriptural type is neglected and heathenised in obedience to the fashion of the time. If we compare the Cupids in his Rinaldo and Armida, with the angels which minister to the Virgin and Child; or the Cherubim weeping in a Deposition, with the Amorini who are lamenting over Adonis; in what respect do they differ? They are evidently painted from the same models, the beautiful children of Titian and Fiamingo.
