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"That is what an angel is, an idea of God." So said the great mystic, Meister Eckhart. But ideas have no visual form, and the struggle to make angels concrete absorbed the energies of Europe's artists for nearly 1,000 years. The angel became one of the master images of religious experience.
"The concept of an angel," wrote one recent student of the creatures, Theodora Ward, in Men and Angels, "is peculiar to the monotheistic religions, in which the immensity of the power concentrated in one universal god must somehow be channeled to reach the needs of man, as a great river may be diverted into a system of ducts to irrigate fields." But how to embody this concept? The first angels in Christian art look like ordinary men, whether painted on catacomb walls or preserved in mosaic on the 5th century walls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. What the artist stresses is the power of assuming human shape and walking among men, who "entertain them unawares."
The sign by which angels are known today—wings— did not appear for some time. Pre-Christian mythology abounded with winged, supernatural beings, and the Christian angel annexed the symbolic properties of wings—mobility, ascension, elevation and refinement of consciousness, power to move freely between Heaven and Earth. All the same, there were difficulties of symbolization, which is why the distinctions that early theologians drew between various levels of angels did not endure in art. The thrones, in their ceaseless orbit around God, were sometimes depicted as winged wheels, whose hubs were studded with eyes—to indicate their power to see into the heart of divine mysteries.
Cherubim and seraphim were sometimes interchangeable. The traditional pattern for both consisted of a head, hands, feet and six wings—one pair pointing down, one pair up, and the third pair spread to fly. It was a formula that could achieve a hierarchic majesty—no angelic being radiates more effortless authority than the mosaic cherub in St. Mark's in Venice, unfurling his blue wings against a blaze of gold mosaic. In the general humanization of angels during the Renaissance, the cherub's presence quickly succumbed. He became crossed with the amoretti, or baby cupids, of antiquity; the result, a tumbling, rosy piglet of an angel, did not (even in Rubens' hands) quite make up in charm what it had lost in austere dignity. The path to the winged brat on the Christmas card was open.
Recurring Gabriel. As the theological intricacies of Christianity spread, the character and role of angels became more complex and diversified. But if theology particularized, art tended to generalize; a painter could deal with only a limited number of symbols and attributes. More important, his audience—a heterogeneous one, not made up of theologians —could not be expected to carry all the minute subdivisions of angelhood in its head. Consequently only a few kinds of angels were identifiable, and these were linked to basic Scriptural events. The only spirits who stood out, time and again, as individuals were three archangels: Michael, Gabriel and —to a lesser degree—Raphael.