ANGEL WITH VIOLIN Melozzo da Forlì
ANGEL CHOIR Benozzo Gozzoli
ANGEL OF ANNUNCIATION Burne-Jones
MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ANGELS Bellini
ANGEL WITH LUTE Carpaccio
SAINT MICHAEL Perugino
"Paint an angel!" exclaimed Courbet (koor-bay´) the realist to a pupil
who one day asked him how it should be done. "When did you ever see an
angel?" The abashed pupil had to admit that he had never had the good
fortune to see one. "Very well, then, you had better paint the portrait
of your grandfather, whom you see every day." The advice to keep his
head out of the clouds while his feet were on earth may have been
needed by the pupil; but nevertheless angels have been painted time
out of mind, and even such pronounced realists as Courbet and Manet
(mah-nay´) have painted them. And they saw them, too; that is, they
saw the pretty-faced models they turned into angels by adding enlarged
pigeon wings to their shoulder blades. But they were not very spiritual
angels. Realism rather scorns things spiritual, and besides religious
feeling and sentiment in art passed out several centuries before the
coming of the modern realists.
The early men--the Fra Angelicos, the Benozzos (ben-ots-o), the
Filippinos, of the fifteenth century--believed in the Biblical scenes
they painted, and sometimes stated their belief in letters of gold
at the bottom of their pictures. They saw things with the eye of
faith,--saw Madonnas, saints, and angels in visions, and painted them,
as the evangelists wrote, by the aid of inspiration. Perhaps it was
their belief, their intense feeling, that gave the fine religious
sentiment to the work of these early men. Yet they did not invent or
discover the angel in art. It had a more material and commonplace
origin than in medieval belief and religious fervor.