Word: angelically
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Angel painting never recovered from the blow dealt by the Reformation. After Luther's proposal that men could approach God directly by faith through grace, with no intermediaries, the angels were theologically unemployed. The gap they were meant to close had been written out of existence; they were reduced to mere attendant lords, thunderbolt carriers to swell a scene or two. Nineteenth century rationalism seemed to finish them off for good. The remark of a Victorian doctor, that he had never met the soul in a dissection, found its artistic parallel in Gustave Courbet...