angel, it signified Redemption from the consequences of the Fall. The pomegranate, bursting open, and the seeds visible, was an emblem of the future, of hope in immortality. When an apple, a pear, or a pomegranate is placed in the hand of St. Catherine as the mystical Sposa of Christ, which continually occurs, particularly in the German pictures, the allusion is to be taken in the Scriptural sense: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace." V. OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COLORS In very early Art we find colors used in a symbolical or mystic sense, and, until the ancient principles and traditions were wholly worn out of memory or set aside by the later painters, certain colors were appropriate to certain subjects and personages, and could not arbitrarily be applied or misapplied. In the old specimens of stained glass we find these significations scrupulously attended to. Thus: WHITE, represented by the diamond or silver, was the emblem of light, religious purity, innocence, virginity, faith, joy, and life. Our Saviour wears white after His resurrection. In the judge it indicated integrity; in the rich man humility; in the woman chastity. It was the color consecrated to the Virgin, who, however, never wears white except in pictures of the Assumption. RED, the ruby, signified fire, divine love, the Holy Spirit, heat, or the creative power, and royalty. White and red roses expressed love and innocence, or love and wisdom, as in the garland with which the angel crowns St. Cecilia. In a bad sense, red signified blood, war, hatred, and punishment. Red and black combined were the colors of purgatory and the Devil. BLUE, or the sapphire, expressed heaven, the firmament, truth, constancy, fidelity. Christ and the Virgin wear the red tunic and the blue mantle, as signifying heavenly love and heavenly truth.1 The same colors were given to St. John the evangelist, with this difference, that he wore the blue tunic and the red mantle; in later pictures the colors are sometimes red and green. -- 1 In the Spanish schools the color of our Saviour's mantle is generally a deep rich violet. YELLOW, or gold, was the symbol of the sun; of the goodness of God; initiation, or marriage; faith, or fruitfulness. St. Joseph, the husband of the Virgin, wears yellow. In pictures of the apostles, St. Peter wears a yellow mantle over a blue tunic. In a bad sense, yellow signifies inconstancy, jealousy, deceit; in this sense it is given to the traitor Judas, who is generally habited in dirty yellow. GREEN, the emerald, is the color of spring; of hope, particularly hope in immortality; and of victory, as the color of the palm and the laurel. VIOLET, the amethyst, signified love and truth or passion and suffering. Hence it is the color often worn by the martyrs. In some instances our Saviour, after His resurrection, is habited in a violet instead of a blue mantle. The Virgin also wears violet after the crucifixion. Mary Magdalene, who as patron saint wears the red robe, as penitent wears violet and blue, the colors of sorrow and of constancy. In the devotional representation of her by Timoteo della Vite (Bologna Gallery), she wears red and green, the colors of love and hope. GRAY, the color of ashes, signified mourning, humility, and innocence accused; hence adopted as the dress of the Franciscans (the Grey Friars); but it has since been changed for a dark rusty brown. BLACK expressed the earth, darkness, mourning, wickedness, negation, death; and was appropriate to the Prince of Darkness. In some old illuminated MSS., Jesus, in the Temptation, wears a black robe. White and black together signified purity of life, and mourning or humiliation; hence adopted by the Dominicans and the Carmelites. The mystical application of attributes and colors was more particularly attended to in that class of subjects I have distinguished as devotional. In the sacred historical pictures we find that the attributes are usually omitted as superfluous, and characteristic propriety of color often sacrificed to the general effect. These introductory observations and explanations will be found illustrated in a variety of forms as we proceed; and readers will be led to make comparisons and discover analogies and exceptions for themselves. I must stop here; - yet one word more. All the productions of Art, from the time it has been directed and developed by Christian influences, may be regarded under three different aspects. 1. The purely religious aspect, which belongs to one mode of faith; 2. The poetical aspect, which belongs to all; 3. The artistic, which is the individual point of view, and has reference only to the action of the intellect on the means and material employed. There is pleasure, intense pleasure, merely in the consideration of Art as Art; in the faculties of comparison and nice discrimination brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the exercise of a cultivated and refined taste on the productions of mind in any form whatever. But a threefold, or rather a thousand fold, pleasure is theirs who to a sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in Art, and who combine with delicacy of perception and technical knowledge more elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that, in placing before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume any such superiority as is here implied. Like a child that has sprung on a little way before its playmates, and caught a glimpse through an opening portal of some varied Eden within, all gay with flowers and musical with birds, and haunted by divine shapes which beckon onward; and, after one rapturous survey, runs back and catches its companions by the hand and hurries them forward to share the new-found pleasure, the yet unexplored region of delight; even so it is with me: I am on the outside, not the inside, of the door I open. II. OF ANGELS AND ARCHANGELS I. ANGELS THERE is something so very attractive and poetical, as well as soothing to our helpless finite nature, in all the superstitions connected with the popular notion of Angels, that we cannot wonder at their prevalence in the early ages of the world. Those nations who acknowledged one Almighty Creator, and repudiated with horror the idea of a plurality of gods, were the most willing to accept, the most enthusiastic in accepting, these objects of an intermediate homage; and gladly placed between their humanity and the awful supremacy of an unseen God the ministering spirits who were the agents of His will, the witnesses of His glory, the partakers of His bliss, and who in their preternatural attributes of love and knowledge filled up that vast space in the created universe which intervened between mortal man and the infinite, omnipotent LORD OF ALL. The belief in these superior beings, dating from immemorial antiquity, interwoven as it should seem with our very nature, and authorized by a variety of passages in Scripture, has descended to our time. Although the bodily forms assigned to them are allowed to be impossible, and merely allegorical, although their supposed functions as rulers of the stars and elements have long been set aside by a knowledge of the natural laws, still the coexistence of many orders of beings superior in nature to ourselves, benignly interested in our welfare, and contending for us against the powers of evil, remains an article of faith. Perhaps the belief itself, and the feeling it excites in the tender and contemplative mind, were never more beautifully expressed than by our own Spenser: And is there care in heaven? And is there love There is! else much more wretched were the case Of men than beasts! But oh, th' exceeding grace To serve to wicked man, to serve His wicked foe. How oft do they their silver bowers leave, They for us fight, they watch, and duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant, And all for love, and nothing for reward! Oh, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ! It is this feeling, expressed or unexpressed, lurking at the very core of all hearts, which renders the usual representations of angels, spite of all incongruities of form, so pleasing to the fancy we overlook the anatomical solecisms, and become mindful only of that emblematical significance which through its humanity connects it with us, and through its supernatural appendages connects us with heaven. : But it is necessary to give a brief summary of the Scriptural and theological authorities, relative to the nature and functions of angels, before we can judge of the manner in which these ideas have been attended to and carried out in the artistic similitudes. Thus angels are represented in the Old Testa ment: 1. As beings of a higher nature than men, and gifted with superior intelligence and righteousness. (2 Sam. xiv. 17.) 2. As a host of attendants surrounding the throne of God, and as a kind of celestial court or council. (Gen. xxxii. 1, 2; Ps. ciii. 21; 1 Kings xxii. 19; Job i. 6.) 3. As messengers of His will conveyed from heaven to earth; or as sent to guide, to correct, to instruct, to reprove, to console. 4. As protecting the pious. 5. As punishing by command of the Most High the wicked and disobedient. (Gen. xxii. 11; Exod. xiv. 19; Num. xx. 16; Gen. xxi. 17; Judg. xiii. 3; 2 Kings i. 3; Ps. xxxiv. 7; Judith xiii. 20.) 6. As having the form of men; as eating and drinking. 7. As wielding a sword. |