Betwixt these rocky pillars Gabriel sat,
Chief of the angelic guards, awaiting night.
As the Angel who announced the birth of Christ, he has been venerated as the Angel who presides over childbirth. He foretells the birth of Samson, and, in the apocryphal legends, he foretells to Joachim the birth of the Virgin. In the East, he is of great importance. Mahomet selected him as his immediate teacher and inspirer, and he became the great protecting angel of Islamism: hence between Michael, the protector of the Jews and Christians, and Gabriel, the protector of the Moslem, there is supposed to exist no friendly feeling—rather the reverse.
In the New Testament, Gabriel is a much more important personage than Michael; yet I have never met with any picture in which he figures singly as an object of worship. In devotional pictures he figures as the second of the three Archangels—‘Secondo fra i primi,’ as Tasso styles him; or in his peculiar character as the divine messenger of grace, ‘l’Angelo annunziatore.’ He then usually bears in one hand a lily or a sceptre; in the other a scroll on which is inscribed, ‘Ave Maria, Gratia plena!’[90]
The subject called the Annunciation is one of the most frequent and most important, as it is one of the most beautiful, in the whole range of Christian Art. It belongs, however, to the history of the Virgin, where I shall have occasion to treat it at length; yet as the Angel Gabriel here assumes, by direct scriptural testimony, a distinct name and personality, and as the dignity and significance proper to a subject so often unworthily and perversely treated depend very much on the character and deportment given to the celestial messenger, I shall make a few observations in this place with respect to the treatment of the angel, only reserving the theme in its general bearing for future consideration.
In the early representations of the Annunciation it is treated as a religious mystery, and with a solemn simplicity and purity of feeling, which is very striking and graceful in itself, as well as in harmony with the peculiar manner of the divine revelation. The scene is generally a porch or portico of a temple-like building; the Virgin stands (she is very seldom seated, and then on a kind of raised throne); the angel stands before her, at some distance: very often, she is within the portico; he is without. Gabriel is a majestic being, generally robed in white, wearing the tunic and pallium à l’antique, his flowing hair bound by a jewelled tiara, with large many-coloured wings, and bearing the sceptre of sovereignty in the left hand, while the right is extended in the act of benediction as well as salutation: ‘Hail! thou that art highly favoured! Blessed art thou among women!’ He is the principal figure: the attitude of the Virgin, with her drapery drawn over her head, her eyes drooping, and her hands folded on her bosom, is always expressive of the utmost submission and humility. So Dante introduces the image of the lowly Virgin receiving the angel as an illustration of the virtue of Humility:—
Ed avea in atto impressa esta favella
‘Ecce ancilla Dei!’—
and Flaxman has admirably embodied this idea, both in the lofty angel with outspread arms, and the kneeling Virgin. Sometimes the angel floats in, with his arms crossed over his bosom, but still with the air of a superior being, as in this beautiful figure after Lorenzo Monaco, from a picture in the Florence Gallery.
