Angel (Rembrandt)

lamenting over Adonis; in what respect do they differ? They are evidently painted from the same models, the beautiful children of Titian and Fiamingo.

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 childangels 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 characterize 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, scandalized 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! "

As regards the treatment of angels in the more recent productions of Art, the painters and sculptors have generally adhered to received and known types in form and in senti

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ment. The angels of the old Italians, Giotto and Frate Angelico, have been very well imitated by Steinle and others of the German school: the Raffaelesque feeling has been in general aimed at by the French and English painters. Tenerani had the old mosaics in his mind when he conceived that magnificent colossal Angel of the Resurrection seated on a

tomb, and waiting for the signal to sound his trumpet, which I saw in his atelier, prepared, I believe, for the monument of the Duchess Lanti [and now in the Lanti chapel of Sta Maria sopra Minerva].

Mr. Ruskin remarks very truly, that in early Christian Art there is "a certain confidence, in the way in which angels trust to their wings, very characteristic of a period of bold and simple conception. Modern science has taught us that a wing

cannot be anatomically joined to a shoulder; and in proportion as painters approach more and more to the scientific as distinguished from the contemplative state of mind, they put the wings of their angels on more timidly, and dwell with greater emphasis on the human form with less upon the wings, until these last become a species of decorative appendage, a mere sign of an angel. But in Giotto's time an angel was a complete creature, as much believed in as a bird, and the way in which it would or might cast itself into the air and lean hither and thither on its plumes was as naturally apprehended as the manner of flight of a chough or a starling. Hence Dante's simple and most exquisite synonym for angel, 'Bird of God;' and hence also a variety and picturesqueness in the expression of the movements of the heavenly hierarchies by the earlier painters, ill replaced by the powers of foreshortening and throwing naked limbs into fantastic positions, which appear in the cherubic groups of later times." [Some of] the angels from the Campo Santo at Pisa are instances of this bird-like form. They are Uccelli di Dio. [Others] are examples of the later treatment.

I pause here, for I have dwelt upon these celestial Hierarchies, winged Splendors, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, till my fancy is becoming somewhat mazed and dazzled by the contemplation. I must leave the reader to go into a picturegallery, or look over a portfolio of engravings, and so pursue the theme, whithersoever it may lead him, and it may lead him, in Hamlet's words, "to thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul!"

These

Having treated of the celestial Hierarchy in general, we have now to consider those angels who in artistic representations have assumed an individual form and character. belong to the order of Archangels, placed by Dionysius in the third Hierarchy: they take rank between the Princedoms and the Angels, and partake of the nature of both, being, like the Princedoms, Powers; and, like the Angels, Ministers and Messengers.

Frequent allusion is made in Scripture to the seven Angels who stand in the presence of God. (Rev. viii. 2, xv. 1, xvi. 1, etc.; Tobit xxii. 15.) This was in accordance with the popular creed of the Jews, who not only acknowledged the supremacy of the Seven Spirits, but assigned to them distinct