28 Angel: in a picture of Christ healing the Sick (N. Poussin)
Rubens gives us strong well-built youths, with redundant yellow hair; and chubby naked babies, as like flesh and blood, and as natural, as the life: and those of Vandyck are more elegant, without being more angelic. Murillo’s child-angels are divine, through absolute beauty; the expression of innocence and beatitude was never more perfectly given; but in grandeur and power they are inferior to Correggio, and in all that should characterise a divine nature, immeasurably below Raphael.
Strange to say, the most poetical painter of angels in the seventeenth century is that inspired Dutchman, Rembrandt; not that his angels are scriptural; still less classical; and beautiful they are not, certainly—often the reverse; but if they have not the Miltonic dignity and grace, they are at least as unearthly and as poetical as any of the angelic phantasms in Dante,—unhuman, unembodied creatures, compounded of light and darkness, ‘the somewhat between a thought and a thing,’ haunting the memory like apparitions. For instance, look at his Jacob’s Dream, at Dulwich; or his etching of the Angels appearing to the Shepherds,—breaking through the night, scattering the gloom, making our eyes ache with excess of glory,—the Gloria in excelsis ringing through the fancy while we gaze!
I have before observed that angels are supposed to be masculine, with the feminine attributes of beauty and purity; but in the seventeenth century the Florentine painter, Giovanni di S. Giovanni, scandalised his contemporaries by introducing into a glory round the Virgin, female angels (angelesse). Rubens has more than once committed the same fault against ecclesiastical canons and decorum; for instance, in his Madonna ‘aux Anges’ in the Louvre. Such aberrations of fancy are mere caprices of the painter, improprieties inadmissible in high art.
Of the sprawling, fluttering, half-naked angels of the Pietro da Cortona and Bernini school, and the feeble mannerists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what shall be said? that they are worthy to illustrate Moore’s Loves of the Angels? ‘non ragioniam di lor;’ no, nor even look at them! I have seen angels of the later Italian and Spanish painters more like opera dancers, with artificial wings and gauze draperies, dressed to figure in a ballet, than anything else I could compare them to.
The most original, and, in truth, the only new and original version of the Scripture idea of angels which I have met with, is that of William Blake, a poet painter, somewhat mad as we are told, if indeed his madness were not rather ‘the telescope of truth,’ a sort of poetical clairvoyance, bringing the unearthly nearer to him than to others. His adoring angels float rather than fly, and, with their half-liquid draperies, seem about to dissolve into light and love: and his rejoicing angels—behold them—sending up their voices with the morning stars, that ‘singing, in their glory move!’
