Word: offing
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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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...
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...
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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...
And yet . . . and yet . . . The thought that angels are dead is a nagging one. It is unsatisfactory, and the root of the dissatisfaction goes back to an early angelologist, the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, who warned in the 6th century that "in dwelling upon the nobler images it is probable...