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The one most often painted was Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, sent by God to disclose to Mary that she would give birth to Christ. In the history of a civilization that abounded in images of the Madonna, Gabriel recurred insistently, whether as the impassive, rhythmically contorted enamel figure on the 11th century cover of the Ariberto breviary in Milan or the rainbow-winged presence, solid as a Doric column, who confronts a submissive Mary in Fra Angelico's Annunciation.
One of Gabriel's functions was to preside over Paradise, and this he shared with Michael. The resonant titles of the Archangel Michael read like a blast on the horn of resurrection: chief of the order of virtues, chief of archangels, prince of the presence, angel of repentance, righteousness, mercy, sanctification . . . and, by decree of Pope Pius XII in 1950, the patron angel of policemen. In painting, his main roles were two: driving the rebel angels down to Hell (Michael replaced the fallen Lucifer as chief angel of Heaven) and weighing the souls of the dead, as in Memling's Last Judgment, for virtue and sin. The main reason for Gabriel and Michael's dominion in religious art may be that between them they summed up the main uses God had for his envoys: Gabriel the mediator, the bringer of grace, and Michael the warrior and deputy judge.
Sentimental Ramp. The angelic form, like any other, responded to its environment. As if in answer to the formal strictness and intricate metaphysics of early medieval thought, with its insistence that the world is only a screen and a simile for divine existence, angels like the one who blows the last trump across the wall of the llth century Italian Basilica of St. Angelo in Formis are stern, unbending, and (literally) otherworldly. But the host of warrior angels that a North Italian artist, Guariento, painted in 1344-45, minus their wings and with a few adjustments of costume, could have stepped from some 14th century condottiere's parade ground.
The effect that humanism had on angels (in art, at least) was to stress what the creatures had in common with man. Before angels slid down the ramp of sentimentality at whose bottom they now lie, a perfect balance between their human and spiritual aspects was achieved by, among others, Giotto. The dead Christ was a sight to make angels weep, and in his fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Giotto summed up all its terrible pathos in the little angels that tumble like shot birds in the sky.
After the triumph of High Renaissance naturalism, it became hard to make an angel look as if it belonged in Heaven. That could only be accomplished by the sheer hallucinatory pressure of religious vision, skewed at an angle to match the orthodoxy of the times. The isolated exemplar was William Blake: in 1810, in Vision of the Last Judgment, angels danced on his retina: " 'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almight.' "