Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy 9781107027954, 2014015033

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ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY From earliest times, angels have been seen as instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, angels are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, Meredith J. Gill examines the role of angels in medieval and Renaissance conceptions of heaven. She considers the character of Renaissance angelology as distinct from the medieval theological traditions that informed it and from which it emerged. Tracing the iconography of angels in text and in visual form, she also uncovers the philosophical underpinnings of medieval and Renaissance definitions of angels and their nature. From Dante through Pico della Mirandola, from the images of angels depicted by Fra Angelico to those painted by Raphael and his followers, angels, Gill argues, are the touchstones and markers of the era’s intellectual self-understanding, and its classical revival, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination. Meredith J. Gill is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and coeditor, with Karla Pollmann, of Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception. Among her other publications are articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Storia dell’Arte, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and essays in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome; The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700; The Renaissance World; and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Eric Denker

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027954 © Meredith J. Gill 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gill, Meredith Jane. Angels and the order of heaven in medieval and Renaissance Italy / Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Angels – History. 2. Italy – Religion. I. Title. BL477.G53 2014 2014015033 2350 .3–dc23 ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 Hardback Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY From earliest times, angels have been seen as instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, angels are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, Meredith J. Gill examines the role of angels in medieval and Renaissance conceptions of heaven. She considers the character of Renaissance angelology as distinct from the medieval theological traditions that informed it and from which it emerged. Tracing the iconography of angels in text and in visual form, she also uncovers the philosophical underpinnings of medieval and Renaissance definitions of angels and their nature. From Dante through Pico della Mirandola, from the images of angels depicted by Fra Angelico to those painted by Raphael and his followers, angels, Gill argues, are the touchstones and markers of the era’s intellectual self-understanding, and its classical revival, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination. Meredith J. Gill is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and coeditor, with Karla Pollmann, of Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception. Among her other publications are articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Storia dell’Arte, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and essays in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome; The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700; The Renaissance World; and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Eric Denker

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027954 © Meredith J. Gill 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gill, Meredith Jane. Angels and the order of heaven in medieval and Renaissance Italy / Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Angels – History. 2. Italy – Religion. I. Title. BL477.G53 2014 2014015033 2350 .3–dc23 ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 Hardback Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY From earliest times, angels have been seen as instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, angels are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, Meredith J. Gill examines the role of angels in medieval and Renaissance conceptions of heaven. She considers the character of Renaissance angelology as distinct from the medieval theological traditions that informed it and from which it emerged. Tracing the iconography of angels in text and in visual form, she also uncovers the philosophical underpinnings of medieval and Renaissance definitions of angels and their nature. From Dante through Pico della Mirandola, from the images of angels depicted by Fra Angelico to those painted by Raphael and his followers, angels, Gill argues, are the touchstones and markers of the era’s intellectual self-understanding, and its classical revival, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination. Meredith J. Gill is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and coeditor, with Karla Pollmann, of Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception. Among her other publications are articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Storia dell’Arte, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and essays in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome; The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700; The Renaissance World; and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Eric Denker

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027954 © Meredith J. Gill 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gill, Meredith Jane. Angels and the order of heaven in medieval and Renaissance Italy / Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Angels – History. 2. Italy – Religion. I. Title. BL477.G53 2014 2014015033 2350 .3–dc23 ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 Hardback Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY From earliest times, angels have been seen as instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, angels are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, Meredith J. Gill examines the role of angels in medieval and Renaissance conceptions of heaven. She considers the character of Renaissance angelology as distinct from the medieval theological traditions that informed it and from which it emerged. Tracing the iconography of angels in text and in visual form, she also uncovers the philosophical underpinnings of medieval and Renaissance definitions of angels and their nature. From Dante through Pico della Mirandola, from the images of angels depicted by Fra Angelico to those painted by Raphael and his followers, angels, Gill argues, are the touchstones and markers of the era’s intellectual self-understanding, and its classical revival, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination. Meredith J. Gill is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and coeditor, with Karla Pollmann, of Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception. Among her other publications are articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Storia dell’Arte, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and essays in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome; The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700; The Renaissance World; and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Eric Denker

ANGELS AND THE ORDER OF HEAVEN IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027954 © Meredith J. Gill 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gill, Meredith Jane. Angels and the order of heaven in medieval and Renaissance Italy / Meredith J. Gill, University of Maryland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Angels – History. 2. Italy – Religion. I. Title. BL477.G53 2014 2014015033 2350 .3–dc23 ISBN 978-1-107-02795-4 Hardback Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

page vii

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction

1

1 Pure Act: Medieval Angelology and Dante’s Angels Tongues of Angels Dante and the Scholastics The Divine Comedy

15 28 35 39

2 Wings: Celestial Visions in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance Imagining Heaven The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision

60 60 65 83 91

3 Bodies and Voices: Annunciation and Heavenly Harmonies Ave Maria “A Sound of Tumult Like the Sounds of a Host”: The Music of Angels Jacob’s Ladder 4 Contemplation: Angelic Witness and Empathy The Bread of Angels Tobias and the Angel Raphael Transfigured

100 100 112 134 151 152 171 192

v

vi

efh

Contents

5 Clouds and the Fall: Rebellion, Salvation, and Reform The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caprarola Demons and Artists

203 203 227

Notes

237

Selected Bibliography

297

Index

313

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Fra Angelico, Annunciation (fresco) (1442–1443) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 2 Bernardo Daddi, The Temptation of St. Thomas Aquinas (oil on panel) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 3 Giovanni di Paolo, The Primum Mobile: Beatrice Continues Her Explanation of the Relationship Between the Universe and the Angels, Paradiso 29 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 181) 4 Giovanni di Paolo, The Empyrean: The Celestial Rose, Paradiso 31 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 185) 5 Sandro Botticelli, The Wrathful, The Fallen Angels (Inferno 8) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 6 Sandro Botticelli, The Proud (Purgatorio 12) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 7 Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 28) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 8 Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 29) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 9 Sandro Botticelli, Saturn (Paradiso 21) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 10 Giovanni Britto (attrib.), Paradiso 31, 4 (print), Dante/Con tauole, argomenti, & allegorie, & riformato, riueduto, & ridotto alla sua uera lettura, per Francesco Sansovino fiorentino 11 Piero di Puccio, Theological Cosmology (fresco) (1389–1391) Camposanto, Pisa

page 16 30

44 46

48 49

50

51 51

53 56

vii

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List of Illustrations

12 Vittore Carpaccio, St. Augustine in His Study (canvas) (1502), Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice 13 Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Soul (panel) (82 × 58 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 14 Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Lily and Two Kneeling Figures (Virtue) (panel) (80 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 15 Guariento di Arpo, Angel Enthroned with Scepter and Orb (Throne) (panel) (90 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 16 Domination (detail from Dome of the Angels), Baptistry, San Marco, Venice 17 Antoniazzo Romano, Miracles of St. Michael and Nine Orders of Angels (detail) (fresco) (1464–1468), Chapel of Sant’Eugenia, SS. Apostoli, Rome 18 Jacobello del Fiore, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1438) (283 × 303 cm) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) 19 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (for San Domenico, Fiesole) (panel) (c. 1431) (Louvre) 20 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (fresco) (c. 1440–1441) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 21 Fra Angelico, Last Judgment (panel) (c. 1450) (103 × 65 cm: central panel) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 22 Raphael, Disputà (Theology) (fresco) (c. 1510), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican 23 Michelangelo, Last Judgment (fresco) (1536–1541), Sistine Chapel, Vatican 24 Piero della Francesca, Annunciation (fresco) (1452–1466), San Francesco, Arezzo 25 Fra Angelico, Annunciation, Detail of letter “R” (Missal 558, fol. 33v) (after 1417) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 26 Alessio Baldovinetti, Annunciation (panel) (1447) (Uffizi) 27 Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Angel (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) 28 Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Virgin (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) 29 Bicci di Lorenzo, Annunciation (tempera and gold leaf on panel) (c. 1431) (The Walters Art Museum) 30 Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (marble) (1431/2–1438) (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence) 31 Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity (tempera on canvas) (c. 1500) (National Gallery of Art, London)

63 67 70 71 73

79 84 93 94

96 97 98 104 105 106 109 110 113 117 118

egh

List of Illustrations

32 Zanobi Machiavelli, Coronation of the Virgin (for Santa Croce, Pisa) (panel) (1474) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) 33 Paolo Veneziano, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) 34 Master of the St. Lucy Legend, Assumption of the Virgin (oil on panel) (c. 1485–1500) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) 35 Melozzo da Forlì, Angel (from SS. Apostoli, Rome) (fresco) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) 36 Orazio Samacchini, Madonna and Child in a Glory of MusicMaking Angels with the Magdalene and St. Petronius (oil on canvas) (Saltram House, Plympton, Devon) 37 Piero della Francesca, The Dream of Constantine (fresco) (1452–1566), San Francesco, Arezzo 38 Andrea Mantegna, Man of Sorrows with a Seraph and Cherub (panel) (c. 1485–1490) (Statens Museum for Kunst/ National Gallery of Denmark) 39 Michelangelo, Pietà (chalk) (c. 1538) (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) 40 Boëtius à Bolswert, Divine Love Covering the Eyes of the Soul to Protect Her From Temptation (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) 41 Boëtius à Bolswert, Anima Dissolving Under the Fiery Breath of Divine Love (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) 42 Agostino Veneziano, Pietà (engraving) (after Andrea del Sarto, Puccini Pietà [1516]) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 43 Rosso Fiorentino, Assumption (fresco) (1513–1514), SS. Annunziata, Florence 44 Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbott, Stephen, and Jerome (originally in Ognissanti) (oil on panel) (1518) (Uffizi) 45 Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels (oil on panel) (c. 1518–1521) (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) 46 Andrea del Sarto, Tobias Altarpiece (panel) (1512) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 47 Francesco Botticini, Three Archangels with Tobias (panel) (c. 1470) (Uffizi) 48 Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo, Tobias and the Angel (panel) (1460) (Galleria Sabauda, Turin)

125 126

128 133

134 149

157 159

161

162

163 165

166

169 170 179 180

ix

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49 Sandro Botticelli, The Trinity with Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, Tobias and Raphael (tempera on panel) (1491–1493) (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London) 50 Cima da Conegliano, The Nativity with SS. Helen and Catherine of Alexandria, Archangel Raphael and Tobias (oil on panel), Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice 51 Anonymous, Old Tobit Burying a Jew in Nineveh (panel) (1550) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 52 Anonymous, Tobias Threatened by a Fish (panel) (1550) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 53 Raphael, Madonna of the Fish (oil on canvas, transferred from panel) (c. 1512–1514) (Museo del Prado, Madrid) 54 Raphael, Transfiguration (oil on panel) (1518–1520) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) 55 Fra Bartolomeo, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (Pala Pitti) (oil on panel) (1512) (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) 56 Raphael, Liberation of St. Peter (fresco) (1514), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican 57 Raphael, Expulsion of Heliodorus (detail) (fresco) (1511–1512), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican 58 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Assumption of the Virgin (detail) (fresco) (1526–1530), Duomo, Parma 59 Limbourg Brothers, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Très Riches Heures (MS. 65, fol. 64v) (illumination on vellum) (c. 1416) (Musée Condé, Chantilly) 60 Albrecht Dürer, The Revelation of St. John: 11. St. Michael Fighting the Dragon (woodcut) (1498) (Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) 61 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on oak) (1562) (Musée d’Art Ancien, Musée Royale des BeauxArts, Brussels) 62 Hieronymus Bosch, Apocalypse by Fire or Fall of the Rebel Angels (obverse) (oil on panel) (1500–1504) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) 63 Hieronymus Bosch, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail from Garden of Eden, left shutter of Last Judgment altarpiece) (oil on panel) (1505–1508) (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna)

181

184 185 185 192 194

198 201 201 202

212

213

214

215

217

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List of Illustrations

64 Master of the Rebel Angels (Simone Martini?), Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (panel transferred to canvas) (1340s) (Louvre) 65 Jacopo Bertoja, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (fresco), Sala degli Angeli, Villa Farnese, Caprarola 66 Federico Zuccari, Apotheosis of the Artist (fresco) (c. 1598), Palazzo Zuccari, Rome

220 225 236

Plates Plates follow page xvi. I Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1434–1435) (Uffizi) II Fra Angelico, Annunciation (tempera on panel) (1433–1434) (Museo Diocesano, Cortona) III Giovanni di Paolo, The Primum Mobile: Beatrice Explains the Relationship Between the Heavens and the Orders of Angels, Paradiso 28 (c. 1445) (Yates-Thompson 36, fol. 180) IV Masolino da Panicale, Assumption of the Virgin (Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece) (panel) (1420s) (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples) V Lorenzo Costa, Adoration of the Shepherds (oil on panel) (c. 1499) (National Gallery of Art, London, Layard Bequest, 1916) VI Francesco Botticini, Assumption of the Virgin (panel) (c. 1475–1476) (National Gallery of Art, London) VII Guariento di Arpo, Abraham’s Meeting with Three Angels and the Sacrifice of Isaac (fresco), Carrara Palace, Padua VIII Guariento di Arpo, Angel Weighing Souls and Combatting a Demon (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) IX Guariento di Arpo, Armed Angel with Shield and Lance (Principality) (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) X Guariento di Arpo, Group of Ten Seated Angels with Batons Ornamented with Lilies and Orbs (Dominations) (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) XI Guariento di Arpo, Group of Armed Angels (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) XII Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradise (detail) (canvas) (1588–1595), Sala del Gran Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice XIII Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, God Enthroned Among the Orders of Angels (fresco), Oratory of SS. Annunziata, Riofreddo XIV Antoniazzo Romano, Nine Orders of Angels (detail) (fresco) (1464–1468), Chapel of Sant’Eugenia, SS. Apostoli, Rome

xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Fra Angelico, Annunciation (fresco) (1442–1443) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 2 Bernardo Daddi, The Temptation of St. Thomas Aquinas (oil on panel) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 3 Giovanni di Paolo, The Primum Mobile: Beatrice Continues Her Explanation of the Relationship Between the Universe and the Angels, Paradiso 29 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 181) 4 Giovanni di Paolo, The Empyrean: The Celestial Rose, Paradiso 31 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 185) 5 Sandro Botticelli, The Wrathful, The Fallen Angels (Inferno 8) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 6 Sandro Botticelli, The Proud (Purgatorio 12) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 7 Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 28) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 8 Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 29) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 9 Sandro Botticelli, Saturn (Paradiso 21) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 10 Giovanni Britto (attrib.), Paradiso 31, 4 (print), Dante/Con tauole, argomenti, & allegorie, & riformato, riueduto, & ridotto alla sua uera lettura, per Francesco Sansovino fiorentino 11 Piero di Puccio, Theological Cosmology (fresco) (1389–1391) Camposanto, Pisa

page 16 30

44 46

48 49

50

51 51

53 56

vii

viii

efh

List of Illustrations

12 Vittore Carpaccio, St. Augustine in His Study (canvas) (1502), Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice 13 Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Soul (panel) (82 × 58 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 14 Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Lily and Two Kneeling Figures (Virtue) (panel) (80 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 15 Guariento di Arpo, Angel Enthroned with Scepter and Orb (Throne) (panel) (90 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) 16 Domination (detail from Dome of the Angels), Baptistry, San Marco, Venice 17 Antoniazzo Romano, Miracles of St. Michael and Nine Orders of Angels (detail) (fresco) (1464–1468), Chapel of Sant’Eugenia, SS. Apostoli, Rome 18 Jacobello del Fiore, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1438) (283 × 303 cm) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) 19 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (for San Domenico, Fiesole) (panel) (c. 1431) (Louvre) 20 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (fresco) (c. 1440–1441) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 21 Fra Angelico, Last Judgment (panel) (c. 1450) (103 × 65 cm: central panel) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) 22 Raphael, Disputà (Theology) (fresco) (c. 1510), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican 23 Michelangelo, Last Judgment (fresco) (1536–1541), Sistine Chapel, Vatican 24 Piero della Francesca, Annunciation (fresco) (1452–1466), San Francesco, Arezzo 25 Fra Angelico, Annunciation, Detail of letter “R” (Missal 558, fol. 33v) (after 1417) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) 26 Alessio Baldovinetti, Annunciation (panel) (1447) (Uffizi) 27 Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Angel (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) 28 Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Virgin (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) 29 Bicci di Lorenzo, Annunciation (tempera and gold leaf on panel) (c. 1431) (The Walters Art Museum) 30 Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (marble) (1431/2–1438) (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence) 31 Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity (tempera on canvas) (c. 1500) (National Gallery of Art, London)

63 67 70 71 73

79 84 93 94

96 97 98 104 105 106 109 110 113 117 118

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32 Zanobi Machiavelli, Coronation of the Virgin (for Santa Croce, Pisa) (panel) (1474) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) 33 Paolo Veneziano, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) 34 Master of the St. Lucy Legend, Assumption of the Virgin (oil on panel) (c. 1485–1500) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) 35 Melozzo da Forlì, Angel (from SS. Apostoli, Rome) (fresco) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) 36 Orazio Samacchini, Madonna and Child in a Glory of MusicMaking Angels with the Magdalene and St. Petronius (oil on canvas) (Saltram House, Plympton, Devon) 37 Piero della Francesca, The Dream of Constantine (fresco) (1452–1566), San Francesco, Arezzo 38 Andrea Mantegna, Man of Sorrows with a Seraph and Cherub (panel) (c. 1485–1490) (Statens Museum for Kunst/ National Gallery of Denmark) 39 Michelangelo, Pietà (chalk) (c. 1538) (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) 40 Boëtius à Bolswert, Divine Love Covering the Eyes of the Soul to Protect Her From Temptation (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) 41 Boëtius à Bolswert, Anima Dissolving Under the Fiery Breath of Divine Love (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) 42 Agostino Veneziano, Pietà (engraving) (after Andrea del Sarto, Puccini Pietà [1516]) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 43 Rosso Fiorentino, Assumption (fresco) (1513–1514), SS. Annunziata, Florence 44 Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbott, Stephen, and Jerome (originally in Ognissanti) (oil on panel) (1518) (Uffizi) 45 Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels (oil on panel) (c. 1518–1521) (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) 46 Andrea del Sarto, Tobias Altarpiece (panel) (1512) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 47 Francesco Botticini, Three Archangels with Tobias (panel) (c. 1470) (Uffizi) 48 Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo, Tobias and the Angel (panel) (1460) (Galleria Sabauda, Turin)

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49 Sandro Botticelli, The Trinity with Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, Tobias and Raphael (tempera on panel) (1491–1493) (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London) 50 Cima da Conegliano, The Nativity with SS. Helen and Catherine of Alexandria, Archangel Raphael and Tobias (oil on panel), Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice 51 Anonymous, Old Tobit Burying a Jew in Nineveh (panel) (1550) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 52 Anonymous, Tobias Threatened by a Fish (panel) (1550) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 53 Raphael, Madonna of the Fish (oil on canvas, transferred from panel) (c. 1512–1514) (Museo del Prado, Madrid) 54 Raphael, Transfiguration (oil on panel) (1518–1520) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) 55 Fra Bartolomeo, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (Pala Pitti) (oil on panel) (1512) (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) 56 Raphael, Liberation of St. Peter (fresco) (1514), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican 57 Raphael, Expulsion of Heliodorus (detail) (fresco) (1511–1512), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican 58 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Assumption of the Virgin (detail) (fresco) (1526–1530), Duomo, Parma 59 Limbourg Brothers, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Très Riches Heures (MS. 65, fol. 64v) (illumination on vellum) (c. 1416) (Musée Condé, Chantilly) 60 Albrecht Dürer, The Revelation of St. John: 11. St. Michael Fighting the Dragon (woodcut) (1498) (Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) 61 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on oak) (1562) (Musée d’Art Ancien, Musée Royale des BeauxArts, Brussels) 62 Hieronymus Bosch, Apocalypse by Fire or Fall of the Rebel Angels (obverse) (oil on panel) (1500–1504) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) 63 Hieronymus Bosch, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail from Garden of Eden, left shutter of Last Judgment altarpiece) (oil on panel) (1505–1508) (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna)

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64 Master of the Rebel Angels (Simone Martini?), Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (panel transferred to canvas) (1340s) (Louvre) 65 Jacopo Bertoja, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (fresco), Sala degli Angeli, Villa Farnese, Caprarola 66 Federico Zuccari, Apotheosis of the Artist (fresco) (c. 1598), Palazzo Zuccari, Rome

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Plates Plates follow page xvi. I Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1434–1435) (Uffizi) II Fra Angelico, Annunciation (tempera on panel) (1433–1434) (Museo Diocesano, Cortona) III Giovanni di Paolo, The Primum Mobile: Beatrice Explains the Relationship Between the Heavens and the Orders of Angels, Paradiso 28 (c. 1445) (Yates-Thompson 36, fol. 180) IV Masolino da Panicale, Assumption of the Virgin (Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece) (panel) (1420s) (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples) V Lorenzo Costa, Adoration of the Shepherds (oil on panel) (c. 1499) (National Gallery of Art, London, Layard Bequest, 1916) VI Francesco Botticini, Assumption of the Virgin (panel) (c. 1475–1476) (National Gallery of Art, London) VII Guariento di Arpo, Abraham’s Meeting with Three Angels and the Sacrifice of Isaac (fresco), Carrara Palace, Padua VIII Guariento di Arpo, Angel Weighing Souls and Combatting a Demon (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) IX Guariento di Arpo, Armed Angel with Shield and Lance (Principality) (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) X Guariento di Arpo, Group of Ten Seated Angels with Batons Ornamented with Lilies and Orbs (Dominations) (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) XI Guariento di Arpo, Group of Armed Angels (panel) (Musei Civici, Padua) XII Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradise (detail) (canvas) (1588–1595), Sala del Gran Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice XIII Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, God Enthroned Among the Orders of Angels (fresco), Oratory of SS. Annunziata, Riofreddo XIV Antoniazzo Romano, Nine Orders of Angels (detail) (fresco) (1464–1468), Chapel of Sant’Eugenia, SS. Apostoli, Rome

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XV Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1444), San Pantalon, Venice XVI Filippino Lippi, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (c. 1475) (Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) XVII Fra Angelico, Last Judgment (panel) (1431) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) XVIII Sandro Botticelli, Annunciation (Cestello Annunciation) (panel) (1489–1490) (Uffizi) XIX Simone Martini (with Lippo Memmi), Annunciation and the Two Saints (panel) (1333) (Uffizi) XX Neri di Bicci, Coronation (tempera and gold leaf on panel) (1470–1475) (The Walters Art Museum) XXI Gaudenzio Ferrari, Assumption of the Virgin (detail) (fresco) (1534–1538), Cupola, Santuario della Beata Vergine dei Miracoli in Saronno XXII Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Virgin and Child (panel) (1480s) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) XXIII Filippino Lippi, Assumption of the Virgin and Annunciation (fresco) (1489–1491), Carafa Chapel, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome XXIV Orazio Samacchini, Viol Player (red and black pencil) (Foundation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Inv. 5832) XXV Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Angels (oil on panel) (c. 1524–1527) (Charles Potter Kling Fund, 58.527, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) XXVI Rosso Fiorentino, Angel Playing a Lute (oil on panel) (1520s) (Uffizi) XXVII Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Tobias and the Angel (tempera on panel) (National Gallery of Art, London) XXVIII Cima da Conegliano, Archangel Raphael with Tobias Between SS. Nicholas and James Major (oil on panel, transferred to canvas) (originally in Santa Maria della Misericordia) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) XXIX Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Tobias and the Angel (oil on canvas) (1522–1525) (Galleria Borghese, Rome) XXX Lambert Sustris, Tobias and the Angel on Their Travels (oil on canvas) (c. 1560s?) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) XXXI Domenico Beccafumi, Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on wood) (c. 1524) (Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena) XXXII Domenico Beccafumi, Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on wood) (c. 1528), San Niccolò al Carmine, Siena

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has its origins in my study of the Late Antique Church Father, Augustine (354–430 C.E.), whose ideas about angels, their substance, and their nature were often novel and certainly far-reaching. As I began this project, angels rushed in, to invert Alexander Pope’s famous statement, for I found that I was by no means alone in turning to the subject of the spirit worlds of the past. Augustine’s perspective remains central to my understanding of these worlds, as it must to our understanding of the religious cultures of the West. I have shared portions of these chapters with diverse audiences, beginning with a presentation in fall 2007 at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, my home institution. At the invitation of Paul V. Murphy, I gave a lecture at the Institute for Catholic Studies at John Carroll University on Augustine, his heaven, and angels, and at Indiana University, Bloomington, I had the opportunity to speak to members of the Program in Renaissance Studies, thanks to the kindness of Constance Furey. At Princeton University, for the Renaissance and Early Modern Colloquium, I first probed the subject of Lucifer and the fallen angels, a topic that I later pursued as a Fellow of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Religious Cultures of Religion. The Yale Initiative underwrote my visit to Siena in fall 2011. I owe Sally M. Promey, codirector of the Initiative, a special debt of thanks for suggesting that I also speak about my angels for the Colloquium of the Institute of Sacred Music of the Yale Divinity School.

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At the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in 2009, W. David Myers, Steven F. Ostrow, and Blake Wilson presented inspiring papers in our session on “Angels: Harmonies, Bodies, and Intelligences in Early Modern Europe.” More recently, at the conference “Reading Comparatively: Theories, Practices, Communities,” hosted by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, I explored my hypotheses on angelic language and the Annunciation. An award from the University of Maryland’s General Research Board permitted me a semester’s leave of writing and a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Renaissance Art History from the Renaissance Society of America funded my research in Rome, Riofreddo, and Venice. I am profoundly grateful for a Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy from Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), which made possible the publication of an extensive list of illustrations, including the color reproductions. It is in the nature of angels, whose appeal is universal, that friends, colleagues, and students have offered a wealth of references, often along with a welcome leavening of humor. Among these are Paul Barolsky, Franco and Maria Ferrari, Kenneth Gouwens, W. David Myers, William L. Pressly, Karen Schneider, and Marjorie S. Venit. My students, among them Sarah Cadagin, Steven J. Cody, and Nicole Riesenberger, have offered enthusiastic and thoughtful insights. My colleague and friend from my days at Villa I Tatti, Victor Coelho, illuminated the meaning of Rosso’s lute-playing angel in the artist’s famous painted fragment. On a memorable morning in Rome, William E. Wallace led us to SS. Apostoli where we looked at the Nine Orders in Cardinal Bessarion’s newly reopened funerary chapel. Above all, I owe a very special debt of thanks to Paul Barolsky and William L. Pressly, both of whom read the completed manuscript as well as versions in between, offering encouragement and advice that were more valuable than they can imagine. Paul Barolsky has always been an especially inspiriting interlocutor; in this, I have been exceptionally blessed. Once again, my far-seeing guide at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl, along with Assistant Editor Anastasia Graf, looked after my manuscript from beginning to end. My parents, Margaret and Peter Gill, who introduced me to Fra Angelico at San Marco at a very young age, have my love and appreciation.

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Eric Denker, who never tires of noticing angels. Eric gave me Billy Collins’s collection of poems, Questions About Angels (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991/1999). The medieval theologians whom Collins gently critiques turn out to have been quite curious after all about subjects other than “the little dance floor on the head of a pin.” This book is also dedicated to the memory of these indefatigable angelologists and their peers in the arts who, with at least as much imagination, also worried about the clothes of angels, the impact of angels’ words, and their breathtaking bodily transformations.

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INTRODUCTION

For the American poet, Wallace Stevens, angels were “necessary.” Through their eyes, one “saw the world anew.”1 Angels offer special knowledge, he indicated, by means of their close-to-human incarnation – but it is also their difference from humankind that signifies their meaning. Angels have long had their place in world religions, from the Assyrian, Hindu, and Roman traditions to those of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Their relation to the human person invariably brings revelation, and poses metaphysical questions about the character of faith, the afterlife, and the body. In 1139, Bernard of Clairvaux eloquently inquired as to “the ways of the holy angels,” voicing a universal curiosity in the West that has animated thinkers from Late Antiquity into modern times. From the Jewish Apocrypha through the Bible, angels are instruments of salvation and retribution, mystical unveilers, and harbingers of hope. They are embodiments of the idea of knowledge, often enacting the soul’s active and contemplative capacities. They invite, equally, symbolic and taxonomical identification. Whatever an angel may be – and its potentiality, suspension, and quickness are at the core of its meaning – it is at a defining intersection of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. To define an angel for any period and culture is at the same time to make a contrast with what is incontrovertibly “human.” Although there have been scholarly studies of angels, there has been no comprehensive study of their representation in the West in the Early Modern era, nor a full analysis of their iconography from an

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interdisciplinary perspective. No such single study is possible. By focusing on Italy in the years bracketed by the birth of Dante (1265–1321) and the unfolding of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century, I aim to show how angels engage in shifting visions of the afterlife, and illuminate fundamental definitions of the difference between the material and immaterial worlds. By interrogating written and visual sources, including philosophical and theological treatises, and in evaluating the religious pluralism of the Renaissance, I aim to give new readings to pictorial works and new meaning to angels themselves. In this study, I have three aims: first, to consider the character of Renaissance angelology as distinct from the medieval theological traditions that informed it and from which it grew. I have found it essential to begin with medieval angelology since persons of Christian faith in the Middle Ages, much like those in later centuries, understood themselves to be subjects of the Virgin in the company of her angels, and for them, moreover, the angels comprised forms of explanation and guides to theological discovery. These themes prove indelibly important to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries where continuities are as significant as rupture. Second, I aim to trace the iconography of angels in text and in visual form with a view to making available a precise key to their representation, whether through wing color, attribute, or action. Third, above all, I intend to uncover the philosophical underpinnings of medieval and Renaissance definitions of the angelic and angelic nature as a way to understanding the fabric of Renaissance philosophy itself. From Dante through Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to the vibrant angelic interventions of the Vatican Stanze, angels in the Italian Renaissance are touchstones and markers of the period’s intellectual self-understanding, whether this is in terms of Greco-Roman revival, theological doctrine, or artistic imagination. To think about angels in any of the world’s religions is to think about the question of embodiment, for angels pose the most inviting kind of challenge for theologians, artists, and art historians. It is reasonable, for one thing, to at least ask whether theologians modeled angels after pictorial representations. As messenger figures, they elect human form – a medieval theory posited that they could morph into any shape, such as saints in visions – yet they are strictly incorporeal and without gender in their theological essence, urging the most abstract categories of

Introduction

identification. For the Renaissance, many of these themes seem to have come into focus in ways that get to the heart of that era’s selfunderstanding: in philosophy and theology, as well as in art. The study of angels, or angelology, was a formal component of the medieval theological curriculum of the University of Paris, for which Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), the “Seraphic Doctor,” and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the “Angelic Doctor,” wrote foundational scholastic works. Medievalists across disciplines, as well as those specializing in the religion and cultures of the East, have also long studied angels, leaving us with a rich and illuminating body of scholarship.2 Angels continued to be ubiquitous in Early Modern times, although, as such, they are a relatively neglected subject in contemporary scholarship.3 In looking to the interrelationship of textual and visual traditions, I am also aware of the distinct languages of each. As with the word, the work of art is its own event with its own history, the subject of art history. In examining the illustrations to Dante’s Comedy, for example, I am mindful, as well, of the slippage between word and image, and of the ways in which Giovanni di Paolo’s decisions led to absences, elisions, and inventions when his paintings are compared to Dante’s text. So, too, outside the demands of the written narrative, there is what I am tempted to call a metaphysics of the artistic imagination, and a truth-value in the object itself. Giovanni was an inventor in his own right. And for Dante, to complicate matters further, his angelic metaphysics encompasses the very stuff of visual experience, sight itself and the ways it is courted in reflections, in mirrors, and in light. Flight is another motif, as well. And I mean not only poetic metaphors of seeing, reflecting, and flying, but also their philosophical underpinnings.4 The iconography of angels alone is a broad topic, beginning with the question of their origins as winged figures. It may be a truism expressed by a majority of scholars that angels’ wings derive from those of their antique or “pagan” precursors, yet, like all truisms, while containing a kernel of truth, it also flattens out complexities.5 The early Christian apologist, Tertullian (c. 160–220 C.E.), posited the association of angels and demons with the attribute of wings, and, in linking wings to their aerial and fast-moving qualities, he set in motion their ancient and multifaceted affiliation with the winds.6 The winds, too, in early representations, like angels, carried souls aloft.7 Wings and, with them, the

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multiple eyes on the wings of the Cherubim, derived from the vision of Ezekiel (1: 18; 10: 12), and illustrated both the omnipresence and omniscience of God.8 Together, the winds and the angels were invisible yet potent cosmic agents of transition and transformation, whether in the afterlife or in the here and now. By the time of Donatello’s Cavalcanti Altar (c. 1435) in Santa Croce, Florence, the emotive putti of the frame, projecting the inner turmoil of the Virgin’s response to Gabriel’s arrival, appear perhaps as types of spiritelli, or as small signs of the power of the Holy Spirit. Their name, occasionally employed in the Quattrocento, derives from the motion of air, whether in breath or wind.9 The fifth-century example of the Cotton Genesis contains angels, psyches, and winged personifications such that gender and costume provide keys to distinguishing among them: the winged personifications are garlanded female figures while the angels are purple and gold-clad male figures, yet even these have been misunderstood as human persons.10 At the same time, the likeness of angels to eunuchs and imperial cubicularii has much to reveal not only about concepts of the angelic but also about the socio-historical resonances of imperial culture in Byzantium.11 As it turns out, winged figures from different religious contexts – antique and Christian – can cohabit and even share some of the same symbolic labor while being iconographically distinct. In the Cotton Genesis, for example, winged beings in the Creation pages who are not angels evoke time as a Christian concern while drawing on preChristian imagery.12 Interpretations of winged forms as angels have, however, also been linked with provocative exegetical and iconographical theories, among the most persuasive of which are those that make connections between Augustine’s views on Creation and his conception of angels as illumination and light. Creation as portrayed in the Cotton Genesis and the thirteenth-century mosaics of San Marco, Venice, share an Augustinian identity.13 The image of the winged man in Christianity had independent origins. Ezekiel (1: 5–6) and Revelation (4: 7–8), as instances, or Exodus (25: 20), Daniel (9: 21), and Revelation (14: 6), refer to the wings of Cherubim and Seraphim as instruments of motion and emblems of divine mystery.14 Daniel was explicit in observing that the visionary beasts of his dream had wings like birds (7: 4–6), while the Seraphim of Isaiah (6: 1–3) employ two wings for flight and two sets of two to cover their face and feet. By the

Introduction

third and fourth centuries, Christians thought of wings as “symbols of the angels’ transcendental nature”:15 Every spirit is winged, both angels and demons. In this way, in a moment they are everywhere: all the world is for them one place; what is taking place everywhere is as easy for them to know as to tell. It is thought that their velocity is divine, because their substance is not known.16

The anonymous twelfth-century author of On the Six Wings of the Cherubim delineated the flight of the human soul into the light of love using the very forms of the feathers (five) and wings (six) of the Seraphim (not Cherubim) as metaphors for the spiritual quest of this earthly life and of the soul’s journey to God: “Such flight is supported on the strong wings and delicate feathers of the angelic Seraphim, whereby the soul hovers in both the active and contemplative life.”17 The treatise begins as a description of an annotated drawing of the “Cherubim Mystici” and, as such, suggests the inseparable relation between image and explanation, diagram and theological content.18 At the conclusion of his ruminations on the Sixth Wing, which is “the love of God,” he says: These are the wings of which the psalmist said, Hide me under the shadow of your wings, from the face of the wicked who assail me. And who said, I will take hope in the shadow of your wings until the injustice has passed. These are the feathers of which the psalmist also said, Who will give me feathers like the dove, that I might fly away and be at rest? “That I might fly away,” the psalmist said, abandoning the earth, striving passionately after heaven, and delighting in the eternal blessing, the true freedom of peace. Amen.19

As late as the early fifteenth century, Italian illuminators continued to paint mnemonic “Cherub” images that had by now, to look at one example, become increasingly complex, requiring rotation of the page in order to read the angel’s wings, which surrounded a red face afire with divine love; wings that might spell out autonomous topics for sermons.20 Rearranging the penitential themes of earlier Cherub images, the “flight wings” of this later image, labeled “Confession” and “Satisfaction,” and their subheadings, are as follows: for Confessio, effusion of tears; holy meditation; straightforward speech; truthful thought; and prompt obedience; for Satisfactio, decorous looking; chaste hearing; modest scent;

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temperate eating; and holy touching.21 Thus, as autonomous rubrics to guide the homilist as he composed his sermon, the wings of this Cherub distinguished possible topics from one another while making clear, in this instance, the right actions and sensory controls that should be exercised by the reader. For Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173), in his Mystical Ark, the action of “hovering” evoked the very paradoxes at the heart of angelic spirituality: how, for example, the visibility of the angel leads to contemplation of the invisible. Richard seems to have been a bird watcher, in fact, and his sensitive observation of them informed his spiritual outlook. Like birds, angels and humans can “hover” while in motion, taking in the forms of God’s wisdom. With the help of grace, the Cherubim are able to “fly” to contemplation “‘beyond’ reason;” this he distinguished from contemplation with the aid of reason.22 “And of Richard,” Dante wrote, “who in contemplation was more than human.”23 In fact, the metaphors of wings and flight are universal relative to contemplation: To look at the birds of the sky is to see them flying. One is reminded of those verses of Acarya Atisa, the great Buddhist sage of the Mahayana tradition, saying that a bird with folded wings cannot fly up into the sky just as a man who has not unfolded primordial wisdom cannot contribute to the well-being of the world. To look at the birds is to fly with them. To contemplate is this undivided holistic activity.24

Both writers and artists faced the same kind of challenge in decoding the appearance of angels mentioned in Scripture, including the Hebrew Testament. When three “men” came to Abraham (Gen. 18), this episode was variously represented as the arrival of three young men before a seated Abraham, as in its first manifestation in the fourth-century catacomb on Via Latina, or as encompassing a burst of light between two angels, a Christological reference, as in the fifth-century mosaics of Rome’s basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Genesis does not identify these figures as angels; later Jewish and Christian commentaries determined that that was who they were, and in the Christian context, they became a type for the Trinity. Alternatively, when “men” appeared to Abraham and Sarah at Mamre, this event was interpreted as a typological figuration of the Annunciation.25 The artist’s choice of wings in the literal rendering of the Annunciation itself announces this scene as privileged and heavenly; by contrast, the

Introduction

wingless angels in front of Sarah and Abraham might convey the earthbound quality of the epiphany or the initial reaction of Abraham, which was not to recognize the “men” as angels.26 Angels are equipped with wings according to their context and, too, because of the impreciseness of scriptural descriptions of the appearance of angels. In addition to angels and archangels, Scripture contains references to other angelic beings who, in turn, inspired Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century to set out and rationalize his Nine Orders.27 As early as the late third or early fourth century, Methodius of Olympus alluded to an image with “likenesses fashioned from gold of his angels, who are the Principalities and the Powers, [which] we make in honour and faith in him.”28 Images of winged youths from as early as the seventh century connote angels as a general type, even where the different orders may be intended, and this tradition becomes a very long one in Byzantine art as well as in Christian art more widely.29 In early Byzantine art, sometimes wingless youths stand in for their colleagues whose scriptural likenesses, such as the Cherubim as six-winged tetramorphs, are quite specific. When the Seraphim and Cherubim do appear in closer conformity to Isaiah, for example, or Ezekiel, it is – at least in Byzantine art – in a heightened liturgical setting, particularly in connection with the “Holy, holy, holy” (the Trisagion).30 By the same token, alterations in artistic style in Byzantine art registered changes in the nature and meaning of angels.31 That artists did not always squarely face the challenge of the enigma of the angels, relying as they had to on the incomplete accounts in Scripture and conventions of generic repetition of wingless or winged young men, is perhaps more true of Eastern or Byzantine Christian culture; nonetheless, wings are a point of departure for any consideration of angels’ meaning, in whatever medieval and Renaissance context.32 Color and clouds also served as vehicles for their scriptural bodies, and more frequently in the Latin West to the extent that these forms become part and parcel of angels’ iconography.33 That angels could legitimately be portrayed in art had to be set out in 787 by the Second Council of Nicaea, a fact that demonstrates the very contentiousness of the issue.34 Artists had, however, portrayed angels long before. The fact that an angel is a kind of dissimulation makes the project of representation both exciting and fraught; at once drawing us, and artists of the past, to the edge of an interpretive abyss, and yet leading us, too, to

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the highest levels of metaphysical contemplation.35 We might ask, in fact, whether the controversies of the past – for example, the relation of pagan models to Christian motifs, the risks of idolatry and of debasing spiritual creatures – are really over. Angels often incline to unexpected, even dramatic gestures, and these seem to have been permissible within tacit codes of theological decorum. An angel’s identity as spirit, his sharing simultaneously in divine foreknowledge and human affairs, gives him a unique freedom as a register of the human passions and as an instrument, quite literally, for the music, harmonious or otherwise, of the heavens. In medieval and Renaissance art, angels often embody untrammeled affect. Related to this, they also afford artists myriad opportunities for technical erudition and experimentation, as with foreshortening and cangianti. These, too, cannot be separated from their otherworldly origins and were usually the mark of them. In Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Crucifixion panel from his Maestà, as one example, mourning angels wipe tears on their robes, while others, still more poignantly, kiss Christ’s bleeding hands. In Giotto’s version, in the Scrovegni Chapel, ten symmetrically placed angels – a number reflecting divine perfection, according to the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius – lament Christ’s passing, and one, closest to Christ, tears at his chest with astonishing feeling. All of these angels’ bodies trail into clouds as befitting their scriptural nature but also, as one ingenious interpretation has it, reflecting Giotto’s observation of the tail of Halley’s Comet in 1310.36 The otherworldliness of angels, the absence of bodily travail and physical impediment that characterizes them, could be transferred, by analogy, to the work, or aria, of the artist himself. The notion of aria, as suggested by Giorgio Vasari, meant rendering the invisible visible; here, then, one quality of angels and the goals of Renaissance painting and sculpture intersect.37 When he comments on Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (Plate I), an angelic theme governs his response, for there is: a choir of angels and a numberless multitude of saints male and female, so many in number, so well done and with such varied attitudes and different airs of heads that incredible pleasure and sweetness is felt in seeing it [. . .] because all the saints that are there are not only alive with delicate and sweet airs, but the coloring of the painting seems as if it has been done by an angel.38

Introduction

Vasari uses this same simile when describing Parmigianino’s SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror, this time to refer to the artist’s own painted features and, by association, his divine and inimitable capabilities: And since Francesco had an air of great beauty, with a face and aspect full of grace, in the likeness rather of an angel than of a man, his image on that ball had the appearance of a thing divine. So happily, indeed, did he succeed in the whole of this work, that the painting was no less real than the reality, and in it were seen the lustre of the glass, the reflection of every detail, and the lights and shadows, all so true and natural, that nothing more could have been looked for from the brain of man.39

Leonardo’s precocious addition of an angel to his master, Verrocchio’s, Baptism of Christ, evokes just these qualities of aria for, unlike his companion, Leonardo’s figure is subject to – and creates – its own physical laws. The blue ribbons behind him move on their own, free from nature’s confines, while his halo, skin, and eyes are clear, imbued with light and veiled in atmosphere, “condensations” in their own way, as Aquinas himself might have said.40 Leonardo’s apprenticeship with Verrocchio was bracketed, in fact, by angels: his Tobias and the Angel and his angel in the Baptism.41 The description in these paintings of natural phenomena marks them to be from a hand other than Verrocchio’s. The touch of the brush that gives us a sense of the film just beginning to cloud the eye of Tobias’s fish seems to be the mark of a painter who was mindful of the visual witticism he was making – that is, that this very fish would provide the means to dispel the white films over the eyes of Tobit, Tobias’s father.42 It is as if angels represented for Leonardo both an entrée into the métier of painting and his departure from it as a virtuoso master. Another field of knowledge for which discussion of the character of angels is revealing is that of the philosophy of mind, including theories of communication. In his letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13: 1), Paul famously said: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” Just how angels communicated, and what constituted angelic language, occupied a host of medieval theologians, including Thomas Aquinas and his adversary on this subject, William of Ockham.43 For Aquinas, will guided an angel’s impulse to communicate, and if he willed

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communication with only one other angel – say, Raphael to Gabriel – then only his destined listener would hear him.44 For Ockham, on the other hand, the listener’s will determined whether he might hear the voice of another angel. That voice could also be heard by other angels, depending on their proximity. For Ockham, angels’ thoughts are not private. Behind these differences lie theories of mental language, for Aquinas thought that mental images, in both humans and angels, exist in the intellect in three different ways: in habitu, in actu (or the verbum cordis), and in ordine ad alterum (or ut ad aliud relatum). These correspond respectively to states of idle cogitation, active consideration (or Augustine’s “mental word”), or as a directed, that is, addressed and coordinated communication.45 This last occurs before speech or before writing; in the case of angels, neither of these activities is necessary. Thought and language, for Aquinas, are separate; they are one and the same for Ockham. For Aquinas, the angel grasped his object at once and in all its fullness; this was a perfected and essentially visual operation; a failing in the processes of the human mind leads us to construct words and sentences and the like. For Ockham, angels and mortals think alike, and with language. The reverberations of Aquinas’s and Ockham’s distinctions led subsequent commentators to new interpretations. Richard of Middleton posited that the angelic locutio, the putting of thought into words, was equivalent to producing a spiritual ray that would be aimed at the addressee.46 This variation – and there were others that took opposing views – seems sympathetic to pictorial instances of the Annunciation, such as Fra Angelico’s Cortona Annunciation (Plate II) in which Gabriel’s greeting appears in both golden rays and text. More generally, the questions raised by Aquinas and others led to experimental debates about the nature of the mind itself, the prerequisites for sharing knowledge, the relation between causality and intentionality, and the role of the Aristotelian idea of similitudo.47 Ockham even allowed for a kind of matching of visual representations as a mode of angelic dialogue, and this, too, at least potentially, has great consequences for medieval and Renaissance visual culture. That the subject of how angels spoke to one another was examined so carefully led to real advances in the philosophy of the mind – that is, particularly as angels potentially separated thought from verbal articulation – and it led to the “idealization” and “dramatization” of philosophical problems that remain of urgent interest today.48

Introduction

Inasmuch as the depiction of an angel begs the question of “representation,” I have adopted a structure in this book that is twofold in that it is broadly chronological and also traces bodies that are increasingly “corporeal” or human-like. The Early Modern angel assumes a greater variety of forms – winged with birds’ wings, or wingless, truncated, gendered, fleshly, aerial, or gravity-bound – than did his medieval forebear, and he often has a more identifiably human physique; both of these features are bound to artists’ changing conceptions of natural and divine forms and of the fictive potential of their media. This twofold structure limits and defines my scope, necessarily so given the extent of the scholarly – not to mention popular – literature on angels. efh

In Chapter 1, “Pure Act,” I begin by tracing Late Antique and medieval definitions of angelic nature, setting the stage for Dante’s angelic schema. For readers in the Renaissance, Dante’s theology as a whole came close to being an article of faith, indebted as it was, too, to Augustine and the scholastics. From Beatrice, Dante learns that the fiery circles that they witness are the Nine Orders of the angelic hierarchies. Dante imagines that Gregory the Great, whose variant order of angels Dante had followed in his Convivio, chuckled to himself when he saw how out of order his angels had once been (Paradiso 28, 130–5). Yet although Dante adhered to the influential Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, he went further, linking each order of angels to Aristotle’s mover-intelligences, envisaging an angel – his “l’uccel divino” – as an intermediary in the mortal realm. These are original aspects of his cosmology. As “pure act,” in contradistinction to the synthetic doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, Dante’s angels set into sharp relief the medieval tradition that he had himself reinvented: not only the pervasive Dionysian tradition, but also those of mystics such as Richard of Saint-Victor, Umiltà of Faenza (1226–1310), and others. In Chapter 2, “Wings,” I turn to the material representation of heaven, beginning with Guariento’s remarkable celestial vision in midfourteenth-century Padua in which the Nine Orders of angels, in twentynine panels, are joined to a fresco cycle of biblical subjects emphasizing angelic witness and agency. I link this neglected program not only to the enterprising patronage of the Carrara family and to Paduan intellectual

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culture, but also to the lost decorations of the city’s Augustinian church, the Eremitani, and to the continuity in influence of Augustinian learning in medieval Italy. At Riofreddo, an unknown artist, likely Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, frescoed a colorful diagram of the winged and whirling circles of heaven. In the Roman ambient, later in the fifteenth century, Cardinal Bessarion promotes a careful adumbration of the Nine Orders in his burial chapel at SS. Apostoli, engaging, as well, both Eastern and Western cults of St. Michael Archangel. Here, too, a miracle-working image of the Virgin served as a devotional focus of the program. In Marian subjects, in general, such as the Assumption and Coronation, as well as in panoramic depictions of the communion of the faithful at the Last Judgment, we see emerging a more particular and theologically nuanced pictorial angelology. In “Bodies and Voices,” I focus on panel paintings and fresco cycles, beginning with the Annunciation. In Fra Angelico, I trace a sensitive recapitulation of medieval examinations of theories of angelic language and communication, seeing in Gabriel’s swift movement and steady gaze at least as potent a reference to the supra-lingual facility of angels as we see in the gilt lettering across the picture space. I elucidate the long tradition of music-making angels, in small ensembles as well as modest orchestras, concluding with the airy Roman schemes of Filippino Lippi in the Carafa Chapel of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and of Melozzo da Forlì in SS. Apostoli, whose vertiginous Ascension reprises Bessarion’s sepulchral program at the same foundation. In the later Quattrocento, angels become a touchstone for philosophical debate. The intrepid Pico della Mirandola suggested that humankind could aspire to the level of angels for whom Jacob’s ladder was a mode both of ascent and descent. In this light, the robust, bird-winged forms of Piero della Francesca at Arezzo suggest not only the artist’s theological erudition, but also, perhaps, his awareness of newer, philosophically informed and even somewhat “secularized” perceptions of angels’ meanings. In Chapter 4, “Contemplation,” I examine single devotional works in which angels perform the action of mourners: compassionate supporting players, chorus figures, and stage hands who support the sacred body or who roll back the layers of the heavens in a concise ideogram of salvation. In this chapter, I put to the test the idea that artists of the Renaissance paraphrased the art of the past with a conscious archaism in order to

Introduction

promulgate an ideal of religious reform in the present. In the captivating tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, which Renaissance artists turned to with increasing frequency, beholders saw, as the young Tobias also did, that his guide was a beautiful, good-humored youth; not only a healer, but also an advocate for filial piety and a well-lived life. In the broader outlines of the Book of Tobit, and in the Archangel, in particular, the empathetic capacities of the angels and their talent for disguise are enacted in the course of a journey that privileges miracle and metamorphosis. Finally, in Chapter 5, “Clouds and the Fall,” I consider the light and dark worlds of angels and their demonic siblings. Vasari tells us that Michelangelo anticipated painting the Fall of the Rebel Angels on the far wall of the Sistine Chapel. In this way, the artist envisaged his Last Judgment as the logical outcome of the separation of light from dark, such that the chapel as a whole describes the journey to redemption. I suggest how Raphael’s wispy angelic clouds lead to the naturalistic puffs of Tintoretto and Correggio, intimating a negotiation, as it were, between the observations of empirically inclined artists and their recognition of the ineffable and fugitive character of angels. In the revolving spheres of Raphael’s own Chigi Chapel vault (Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome), beneath a vigorous God as prime mover, the artist’s angels as motion, as presences that will soon be absent, capture well the corporeal conundrum of angelic nature. The repeated choice of the Fall by sixteenth-century patrons may reflect increasing unease and ambivalence about Church teachings and doctrine within a climate of reform. At the same time, fallen angels, both as carnal bodies and as imperfect souls, are more like to human persons, lending them a poignant and empathetic beauty. An eloquent example of the confluence of these charged themes is Beccafumi’s commission for the convent of San Niccolò al Carmine, Siena, where it is expressed in his twin versions of the subject. Underlying his imaginative recasting of the Fall are continued conventions of condemning the early theologian, Origen (c. 185–c. 254 C.E.), whose brilliant propositions about the continuity of angelic and human substances, of body and soul, had long been viewed by the Church as heretical. efh

At the core of my inquiry is the question of why angels matter. How is it that the most insubstantial and featherlight of beings are worthy of our

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attention? In part, my answer lies in what has been a subject hiding in plain sight. I have limited myself mostly to painting among the visual arts and to Italy among the territories of Renaissance Europe by way of making my case study both specific and coherent. More than this, I am animated by the conviction that in studying angels we are in any case always studying the big questions, whether these may be about the nature of existence; about humankind’s relation to the supernal; about the identity of language, or the definitions of “place,” “hierarchy,” “metaphor,” or “love.” Studying angels allows us to follow the reasoning and especially the disagreements of theologians and philosophers, and it makes available to us the imaginations of artists as they grapple with the marvelous problem of representing the invisible. Whether the readers and beholders of the past were eager patrons or idle observers, curious intellects or skeptical scholars, orthodox believers or heterodox theorists, angels clearly spoke to them. This allows us, in turn, to ask: Who, in the end, is the reader or the beholder, and what, in the end, is a representation? I am animated by the myriad answers invented by writers and artists, and by the transcendent beauty of their results. This book speaks to the larger “necessity” of angels that Wallace Stevens once perceived.

CHAPTER ONE

PURE ACT: MEDIEVAL ANGELOLOGY AND DANTE’S ANGELS

The colloquy between angels and humankind is as ancient as religion itself. In his Annunciation at San Marco (Fig. 1), Fra Angelico’s Gabriel has alighted in a loggia that literally magnifies what we might call a colloquy of colloquies. The artist re-presents the Christian mystery of the Incarnation as the courtly encounter of outsize beings whose modeled volumes and colors – sumptuous dark, rose pink and gold, blue shading into purple – project the gravity of the moment. To see the fresco, we climb a stairway; the gravity of the bond between angel and mortal – motion that becomes a deep stillness – moves fully into view only as we ourselves alight before the tableau. It is not by chance that it is to a Dominican to whom we might defer in connection with Renaissance angels. He inherits the teachings of his order’s “Angelic Doctor,” Thomas Aquinas, as well as the Dominicans’ special attentiveness to the homiletic resonance of the image, whether in word or picture. And as followers of Augustine’s Rule, the order also possesses a tradition of engagement with this Church Father’s legacy. The major theologian of the West, Augustine was both an original thinker and an authoritative scriptural commentator. From the later medieval period on, his voice was also heard as poetic, a voice of yearning and inquisitiveness, whether he wrote about the fragility of human experience, about the nature of time, or the essence of language. It is not by chance that Raphael placed Augustine directly in front of Aquinas, and Bonaventure to his right, in his own magisterial summa, the Disputà, nor that he is the only figure in the fresco who is actively

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1. Fra Angelico, Annunciation (fresco) (1442–1443) (230 × 321 cm) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

writing, in this case, dictating to the young scribe at his feet. Dante, with his inimitable profile, stands nearby, as a theologian, then, among theologians. Nor is it an accident that Raphael places Fra Angelico himself at the far left of the picture space, at least as tradition would have it. He does this as if to acknowledge the friar’s privileged access to the heavenly mysteries, and his capacities as seer and exegete. Angels and, equally, their colleagues, demons, are present throughout Augustine’s writings, as they are in those of the Church Fathers generally. From Plato’s time on, the Greek world was populated by daemones, who were intermediate creatures between God and humankind.1 Until about the fifth century C.E., however, these are not to be confused only with the evil spirits later identified as demons for they comprised all spirits. Plato taught of evil daemones among these beings, and it was a perspective inherited in the Christian context by Augustine, among others. Christian persons, however, were obliged to distinguish sharply between good and evil spirits. In his most extended treatment of angels and demons, in the City of God, Augustine speaks of demons as “dii minores” (12, 25) – “divinities” or “spirits.” Demons acted as messengers, and they brought prayers and sacrifices to the gods, who were transcendent.2 Augustine’s angels, by contrast, derive from Scripture, and the more he

Pure Act: Medieval Angelology and Dante’s Angels

read over time, the more his angels became fully worked out. There is always, however, a familial – perhaps sibling-like – affinity between angels and demons from the start. Their existence is a matter of faith, as it is in Catholic doctrine today. Augustine calls good spiritual beings “angels” (Greek: aggelos; Latin: angelus; nuntius) given their biblical role as messengers.3 Apart from the City of God (11–12), in which he describes their creation, he investigates angelic knowledge in De Genesi ad litteram (4), and he ponders angels’ roles in theophanies in De Trinitate (2–3). Demons (daemones) were generally the evil angels or devils (City of God 6, 4; 9, 19). Since the first chapter of Genesis makes no mention of the creation of angels, he interprets that first chapter, “creavit Deus caelum,” as referring to the creation of spiritual beings such that “Fiat lux et facta est lux” (Gen. 1: 3) refers to the creation of angels simultaneously with the creation of light.4 Although he thinks that angels may have been created even before the heavens and light, he notes that they are not coeternal with God.5 From Paul, Augustine knew of the several kinds of angels: in seven ascending orders, the Angels, Archangels, Thrones, Dominations, Powers, Principalities, and Virtues. They manifest themselves in choirs and legions.6 Yet he does not say more about their hierarchy. This did not, however, prevent the authors of Augustine’s stunning fourteenth-century marble arca at San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, Pavia, from embellishing the gable of the saint’s memorial with representatives who appear at least to allude to the Nine Choirs, and as if to recognize the Church Father’s angelology. Eight wingless angels, with their attributes, stand at the corners of the summit of the tomb.7 By the Middle Ages, however, the angelic hierarchy was indelibly ordered in response to Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy of c. 500–600, which was known in the West through a ninth-century translation.8 Like Augustine himself, Pseudo-Dionysius looked to Scripture for the foundations of his classificatory system, supplementing Scripture with other authorities but for the first time subjecting his hierarchies to coherent principles and laws. But it was Scripture that revealed for him the essence of the angelic, and his triadic model of hierarchy – Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Powers, Virtues; Principalities, Archangels, Angels – became the best-known source for angelology after the sixth century.9 At times, he was at variance with Scripture. Only his Archangels and Angels – the lowest orders – may meet with mortal persons. His explication, then, of Isaiah’s encounter with the Seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6) assumes a

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symbolic aspect; the Seraphim were, he says, actually Angels in disguise.10 More than this, and appealing perhaps to his Renaissance readers, PseudoDionysius thought the human mind incapable of completely comprehending divine things; “knowledge only comes through the ‘truly mysterious darkness of unknowing’,” and while contemplation is a prerequisite, it is not full revelation.11 For him, “‘signs and symbols pointed the seeker of truth on his way, not logical argument.’”12 With respect to representing those “signs and symbols,” perhaps the act of painting itself, he also noted that “forms, even those drawn from the lowliest matter, can be used, not unfittingly, with regard to heavenly beings.”13 Once Johannes Scotus Eriugena (810?–877) had produced his exemplary version of the Celestial Hierarchy from the Greek in 850, medieval thinkers infused their own readings of Pseudo-Dionysius with an Augustinian strand, particularly from the early twelfth century onward.14 Abbot Suger came upon a copy of the works in his monastic library at Saint-Denis, and this discovery facilitated the convergence of three identities: Dionysius, the Athenian apostle of St. Paul; Saint Denis, martyr and first bishop of Paris; and the historical author of the rediscovered Late Antique writings. This propitious, if mistaken intersection of persons, beginning with a figure from the apostolic era, lent its own inestimable prestige to the writings’ reception, and it was perhaps specifically the conflation relative to the life of Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, which fostered the dissemination of the iconography of the Nine Choirs.15 Around 1135, and from the vantage point of one of the largest schools of theology of his day, the Augustinian Canon, Hugh of SaintVictor (c. 1096–1141), wrote an important commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy. Such works multiplied in the next century, despite the condemnation, in 1210, of Eriugena’s theses. Among these commentators were Jean Sarrazin, Albert the Great, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Robert Grosseteste, and, of course, Thomas Aquinas who, although he did not concentrate on the works alone, cited Pseudo-Dionysius more often in his Summa theologiae than Aristotle.16 Pseudo-Dionysius’s direct influence on the visual arts is less easy to define, even taking into account the essentially mystical and abstract character of his teachings. Several major themes in the reception of Pseudo-Dionysius lay in medieval and Renaissance metaphysics, especially as related to constructs of light and the soul, which were key for

Pure Act: Medieval Angelology and Dante’s Angels

Eriugena; they also pertained to numerology as a key component of the Neoplatonic universe. For Eriugena, angels are invisible light; yet “through the action of their ministries reflected in their names, they become visible light, or theophanies, in the sphere of human affairs.”17 Becoming, then, an image of goodness, light shines on symbols or figures that to mortal eyes appear as figures of beauty. Then “this essentially cataphatic stream of angelic spirituality draws humanity into God by means of the beauty of the images that light illumines.”18 Gregory the Great (540–604) encapsulated this aspect of the angelic in the material metaphor of colored precious stones: That angel which was first established is spoken of by the prophet, You were the seal of likeness, full of wisdom and perfected in beauty; you were among the delights of God’s paradise. . . . The prophet quickly adds: Every secret stone was your secret covering: carnelian, topaz, and jasper, chrysolite, onyx and beryl, sapphire, carbuncle, and emerald. Behold, he mentioned the names of nine stones, since there are nine perfect orders of angels. This same first angel was made visible, adorned and covered with the nine kinds of stones.19

For Gregory, the beauty of angels leads persons who contemplate it back to God, the Father of Lights (James 1: 17); that beauty renders an angel visible.20 In contrast to this cataphatic or positive tradition, there is, too, in Christianity its counterpoint in an apophatic (or negative) one wherein the vision of God’s face as ineffable light constitutes such brilliance that it causes blindness and a dark eclipse. Angels veil the blinding light of the divine yet mediate it for the human senses, much as Jesus’ incarnation mediated the light of the Father for mortal persons.21 That the angels mediated between the divine and the rest of creation endowed them incidentally with a critical role with respect to the beatific vision, which would be an especially controversial subject in the fourteenth century.22 The cataphatic characteristic of angels as light generally dominates over the apophatic tradition, at least in the medieval era; this apophatic tradition emphasizes the unlikeness between God and his creations and the essential unknowability of God. In the cataphatic mode, however, which posits continuity between divine and created beings, there is a possibility for revelation in Scripture, and in the workings of reason, in the similes, as it were, between God and the

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created world. In such an approach, the angels may be defined in terms of the anagogical and the apprehensible; they are themselves a unique “link between the transcendent and immanent nature of God.”23 Even such an abstract thinker as Dionysius, whose thought, although profoundly apophatic, embraces both methods, was certain that God had: clothed these immaterial hierarchies in numerous material figures and forms so that, in a way appropriate to our nature, we might be uplifted from these most venerable images to interpretations and assimilation which are simple and inexpressible. . . . The beautiful odors which strike the senses are representations of a conceptual diffusion. Material lights are images of the outpouring of an immaterial gift of light.24

Angels, for him, as for his commentators, were both gifts of the Father of Lights and articles of contemplation; in their symbolic nature, as in Scripture’s “wheels,” “chariots,” and “thrones,” in their dissimilarity from God, they trouble us into elevated contemplation of him.25 For Hugh of Saint-Victor, Scripture itself was “the light, by way of the various figures of symbols, through which that most blessed and immaterial hierarchy of angels is manifested to us.”26 Not only were angels to be identified by light, however, for the general anagogical sense of Scripture from the third century on also allowed, of course, for many other objects and creatures to be interpreted as angels, such as rocks, trees, winds, sisters, and kings.27 The word “star” might bring angels to mind, for example, or the word “Jerusalem” might call up a city thronging with celestial beings. The word “angel,” conversely, could be translated into something else; Bonaventure, for example, at one point read the literal angels of Genesis as the Trinity, even though, at another place, he read a reference to the stars as one to the angels.28 As with the medieval compendium of patristic writings, the Glossa Ordinaria, a tendency above all to read christological meaning into angelic stories predominated. Bonaventure, like the Glossa, used the story from the Book of Tobit of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael to preach a message about Christ; for he could cure souls while Raphael could not. Anagogy itself, as Pseudo-Dionysius taught, brought the mind heavenward.29 For persons of all walks of life, angels could be in this way ubiquitous, potentially and in substance, hidden from plain sight, and present at every turn. This is certainly the case with the angelic allegories of Jacobus de Voragine’s popular Legenda Aurea (1255–1266), a collection that, in its

Pure Act: Medieval Angelology and Dante’s Angels

widespread dissemination as both text and homiletic source, was a ubiquitous influence in its own way. Alongside Caesarius of Heisterbach’s handbook for Cistercian novices, the Dialogus Miraculorum (c. 1223), and the Seraphic Doctor’s own writings, Voragine depicts the myriad ways that angels consorted with saints, intervened in worldly affairs, and prepared the path to salvation.30 But the angelic equation with divine light, in the Dionysian vein, was steadfast and pervasive among medieval exegetes. For Eriugena, the Trinity is a “three-fold luminosity,” the light of which the angels share and project in their theophanies, for “Every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition or a selfmanifestation of God.”31 This angelic voice or vision – “God-light” – as theophany is necessary for human understanding even though the angels themselves look at God differently, in their own “simple, unmixed theophany,” “without image.”32 Human persons need signs as their theophanies; they need the image that comes to a mind that has first been “cleansed of images” by angels, then lit by them in a “sequence of signs” so that the soul may be drawn to a “vision” of God.33 The movement of the “spiritual senses” from “sensible symbols” (truths in Scripture, such as the tabernacle or visions of the prophets) to “intellectual” ones (immaterial theophanies) to contemplation of God, as explicated by Eriugena, resonates with Augustine’s theories of divine illumination.34 Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy is perhaps the most comprehensive medieval analysis of the symbolic potency of angels as it is, of course, an important treatment of symbolic typologies, in general. Hugh’s “visual exegesis” incorporated a sacramental perspective as well as an account of images that has special relevance for art. He defined a symbol as “a collection of visible forms for the demonstration of invisible realities,” and, too, as something that could work anagogically.35 Sacred mystery is made up of two kinds of symbols: those of nature that illustrate the mystery of Creation’s greatness and, second, the symbols of grace available only to the faithful that show God as present through the Word, through Christ. The soul is reconciled to Truth as a “thing” (res) unified with an “image” (imago) in a christological relationship, and both are proof of invisible truths.36 For Hugh, the angels model in their earthly missions the humility of Christ himself.37

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But there were, as well, other symbolic and metaphorical themes that played out in the visual arts. In his Soul’s Journey into God, Bonaventure synthesized a set of twelfth-century meditations on the Celestial Hierarchy, treating them, as well, in view of the philosophical curriculum of the University of Paris, where both he and Aquinas were teachers.38 In his prologue, he narrates the moment at which he decided to write the treatise. In 1259, two years after his election as Minister General of the Friars Minor, he journeyed to Mount La Verna to pay homage to the site where Francis had received the stigmata: While I was there, reflecting on various ways by which the soul ascends into God, there came to mind, among other things, the miracle which had occurred to Blessed Francis in this very place: the vision of a winged Seraph in the form of Christ crucified. . . . While reflecting on this, I saw at once that this vision represented our father’s rapture in contemplation and the road by which this rapture is reached.39

That Bonaventure recalled the Seraph, the highest among the orders, as both a sign and a vehicle for inner spiritual formation, as modeled by St. Francis at the moment that he became visibly marked as alter Christus, suggests angels’ powers to lead the human mind beyond itself toward the very mysteries of faith. Francis himself, by means of his vision of the sixwinged Seraph and also his stigmata, was a living sign of the inextricable relation among human persons, the Seraphim as divine love, and the ardent love of Christ at his Crucifixion.40 As Bonaventure concluded, the six wings of the Seraph in themselves symbolized “the six levels of illumination by which, as if by steps and stages, the soul can pass over to peace through ecstatic elevations of Christian wisdom.”41 His soul’s journey correspondingly took six chapters, from the realm of the earthly senses to the state of grace to which they are perfected in heaven, very much along the trajectory of Augustine’s famous epiphany in his mother’s company at Ostia.42 “By entering into itself, [the soul] enters the heavenly Jerusalem, where beholding the choirs of angels, it sees in them God, who dwells in them and performs all their operations.”43 Quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, he notes that: God loves in the Seraphim as charity, knows in the Cherubim as truth, is seated in the Thrones as equity, reigns in the Dominations as majesty, rules in the Principalities as principle, guards in the Powers

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as salvation, acts in the Virtues as strength, reveals in the Archangels as light, assists in the Angels as piety.44

On entering the Temple of Jerusalem in his final, symbolic journey, Bonaventure considers the two angels over the ark: the first Cherub represents meditation on God in the divine unity, while the other Cherub symbolizes meditation on God as Trinity. Between them lies the mercy seat that symbolizes Christ, and it is on Him that the angels invite Bonaventure to contemplate, guiding him to the ultimate goal of a kind of mystical ecstasy delineated by Pseudo-Dionysius in his Mystical Theology.45 In its mystical ascent from Francis’s revelation of the Seraph and the Crucifixion, through the choirs of angels to Christ himself as the mercy seat between the Cherubim, the soul has traveled from earthly vision to ecstatic transport. The arrangement of the Cherubim flanking the throne of Christ, an Old Testament subject invoked by Gregory the Great, surely left its imprint on or, at the very least, intersected with the iconography of Christ enthroned, underscoring the devotional efficacy of the image as a guide to contemplation.46 The tradition, too, among these and other writers, that the essential way in which the angels manifest themselves to human persons is through their names (“angelorum nomina” for Gregory the Great), on the one hand, and their actions and the descriptions of their “ministries” (“ipsa officiorum vocabula,” in Gregory’s words), on the other, has a profound bearing on the indelible clarity of their gestures and attributes in pictorial contexts, as well as on their visible inscriptions. As Augustine had noted: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel’.”47 For Dionysius, the angels are not only drawn into full contemplation of God, becoming beautiful by his beams, for they are also in a state of wonderment over his actions. The Seraphim, in particular, “feast upon the sacred vision which nourishes the intellect.” Dionysius notes that the angels “puzzle over the nature of Jesus” who “instructs them ‘directly about the kindly work He has undertaken out of love for man.’”48 In this respect, Dante’s definition of an angel as “pure act” is fully consistent with Dionysius. “Archangels,” says Gregory, “are distinguished

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by personal names in order to point out by words what their action signifies. . . . Those spirits that are sent take on their name-word according to the service they perform.”49 Gabriel’s name means “strength of God,” and so his ministry is that of a warrior; his heavenly and worldly identities converge. To take another example, “Cherubim” in Hebrew means “fullness of knowledge,” and so their ministry is that of the pursuit of wisdom. This ministry is enacted by human persons in seeking and using knowledge toward spiritual purposes.50 The religious orders, in particular, traced parallels between their earthly ministries and the ministries of the heavenly hierarchy, which, in its philosophical underpinnings and in its iteration of serried ranks, provided exemplars and mirrors for notions of community and ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth.51 Apart from the philosophical ramifications of the very concept of hierarchy, the division of the orders into triads endowed Pseudo-Dionysius’s lowest orders, especially the Archangels and Angels, with special meaning. As active messengers between heaven and earth, they could be partnered with priests and deacons, with bishops above them; this is why, for example, angels in fifteenth-century painting are often depicted as deacons, wearing stoles over their vestments.52 More than with the subject of angelic nature, perhaps, members of the religious orders were concerned with the moral dimension of their links with angels, a dimension underlined by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that bound them to the saints and angels in heaven. St. Benedict’s Rule even noted that angels perform as God’s eyes and ears, and let Him know of monks’ failings. In an elegant play on angulus/ angelus, St. Bernard, in a sermon on guardian angels, noted: “In every public place, in every hidden nook [angulus], respect thy angel. Would you dare do in his presence what you would not do if you saw me?”53 Monks lived out their lives under the unending gaze of the all-seeing angels. In the Benedictine Rule’s seventh chapter, “On Humility,” the captivating image of Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28: 12), in which angels ascend and descend, means that monks “descend through exaltation and ascend through humility.” Angels are a way of comprehending God’s omniscience, and they join with monks in the shared hard work of prayer and in the celebration of God’s mysteries. Once, at Mass, when the transubstantiated Host rolled out of the hands of a sinning priest and off the altar, an angel carried it heavenwards, a sign not only of

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angelic surveillance but also, in general, of the vital participation of the angels in the liturgy.54 In his nineteenth chapter, “On the Way of Singing the Divine Office,” Benedict’s Rule reminded monks that when they sang the psalms, they were singing in the presence of God and the angels.55 When necessary, angels are impelled to scold their charges, and when acedia, as a kind of melancholy sloth, befalls them, the angels are able to cheer them up.56 Since the times of the Desert Fathers, when companionable angels urged on their saintly wards and served as pallbearers at their deaths, angels and monks had always co-habited in a special sense, and knew each others’ ways.57 For Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the exemplary monk was very much like an angel in his asexuality, eternal reflection on, and worship of the divine, and in his obedience to God’s will.58 Bernard juxtaposed the “unity, charity, and peace” of the angels with the “jealousy, individuality, and restlessness” of Lucifer and certain human persons, highlighting here by inference the tempting worldly context of his listeners and their human foibles in contrast to the ideal communal harmony modeled by the angels in their hierarchy.59 Angelic sodality offered a solution to the potential challenges that ties of friendship might pose to the larger social order. Angels could intervene on behalf of a monk, as they were a paradigm for the superior who went out of his way on behalf of his brothers.60 They were, too, the measure of the chaste life, if not its very instruments.61 Following Bonaventure’s lead, the Franciscans, especially, but also the Dominicans, drew upon angelic typologies.62 In this, both the monastic and mendicant orders, both monk and friar, shared their reverence for angels, even if the ideals of contemplative solitude, on the one hand, and active, apostolic mission, on the other, led the angels to act in different capacities as mentors.63 In his Legenda Maior, an official biography of Francis, Bonaventure presented the saint as the sixth angel of the Apocalypse, and Francis himself held the angels, and St. Michael himself, very dear. Members of the order frequently referred to their founder and to themselves as angels, and they viewed their heavenly colleagues as combining active and contemplative values as ordained by the structure of the Nine Orders. Like the angels, their itinerant calling lent them a shared profile.64 As the Franciscan Order, and Bonaventure as Minister General, faced radical challenges from the Spirituals, angelology became a kind of battleground for

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orthodoxy. These subversive critiques of the institutional status quo lent angelic iconography a heightened meaning. The fourteenth-century Roman tribune, Cola di Rienzo, for example, himself much influenced by heretical Franciscans, sponsored paintings on the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo that portrayed angels rescuing Rome and the Church. Prophecies of the advent of an angelic pope were widespread in this period.65 It is perhaps not surprising, then, given the intimacy of the religious and angels through the medieval and Renaissance eras, that reformers would seize upon the fraternization of monks and angels – this “curious angelic spirituality” – as anathema.66 From at least the twelfth century, any theological debate on the qualities of love as fiery or burning suggested the Seraphim, between whom and God “no creature intervenes,” while the Cherubim participated in evaluations of the role of the mind in seeking God; thus, the two orders could model affect and the heart, on the one hand, and intellect and the mind, on the other.67 In the medieval university town of Padua, it is perhaps not by chance that the Cherubim in two painted programs bear roundels inscribed with their identifying characteristic, an angelic affirmation of the high calling of the intellectual life. A relatively neglected yet important medieval authority on angels and affect, one who synthesized and added to the Dionysian tradition, is Thomas Gallus (Thomas of Saint-Victor; Thomas of Vercelli) (d. 1246), the French founder of the monastery of Sant’Andrea at Vercelli, who began as an Augustinian canon at the abbey of Saint-Victor.68 For Gallus, following Eriugena’s lead, the Seraphim embodied an affective love and charity, guiding the soul into God.69 The angels, in general, and the Seraphim and Cherubim, in particular, as discussed by their medieval specialists and also as treated by writers on mystical consciousness today, invite an inclusive consideration of questions of divine presence and mediation. In this connection, the function of the work of art arises. Does one, medieval scholars asked themselves – must one – necessarily experience the divine through language, bodies, and symbols? Or does – actually can – an unmediated encounter with God exist? The mediating vehicles of language and symbols are culturally determined representations, indicative of a specific time and place; they are, then, potentially imperfect vehicles for communion with the ineffable.70 The variety of explanations and extrapolations on the paradoxical

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ways of the angels in the medieval period suggests that the very diversity of the orders’ ways of living within the sight of God offers answers. Angels not only pose the question, for they also offer many explanations. Like the work of art – like the Cherubim, in fact – they consist of representations that reconcile unlike and invisible truths. Conversely, like the burning Seraphim, the angels constitute truths in their own right, truths that are living presences that choose to reveal themselves to mortal persons in multiple, unmediated ways. In this light, the influential formulation of “likeness and presence” devolves even more to the angels than to the work of art, and it comes to rest with special pointedness on the image of the angel himself.71 The matter of mediation also relates, of course, to theories of the senses and, too, to the topic of the human apprehension of heavenly phenomena by means of extraordinarily poetic and wide-ranging metaphors. For Gregory, angels are rendered visible by beauty. His own metaphor, in Homily 34, is the beauty of nine precious stones.72 To the synthetic mind of Thomas Gallus, we may be illuminated by the angels with active effort, and in four ways that seem congenial to a consideration of the material representation of angels: first, by illumination within, by Jesus, possibly with respect to his humanity; second, by regarding (“looking upon”) the anagogical light of Scripture; third, in “looking back” to the revelations of the Fathers; and, fourth, by reflection on the angelic illuminations as anagogical codes.73 There are, then, multiple and rich associations when he writes in his Extract: “Afterward, let us contemplate, according as we are able, the angelic hierarchies manifested to us by the illuminations themselves as anagogical signs,” or of “the guiding hand of material symbols.”74 In his poetic and suggestive Prologue to the Third Commentary on the Song of Songs (1224), Thomas uses the metaphor of the recollected and desired kiss to encapsulate the intertwined themes of union, language, and love.75 The kiss for him, in the eloquent analysis of Steven Chase: is a metaphor of language, or more precisely, language silenced; the lips that must be silent in a kiss are the same lips that speak. Yet the silence of the kiss, which represents the death of the intellect, the ineffable cessation of speech, is also the birth of passion and charity. Thus, for Gallus, the kiss is a metaphor of love; the same lips that speak in silence spark passion. And the kiss is a metaphor of union with God, or deification.76

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“In effect,” says Chase, with respect to Thomas’s angelic spirituality, “Gallus transfigures the angelic hierarchy into a kind of angelic anthropology.”77 Before him, in Richard of Saint-Victor, and after him, in Bonaventure, the ultimate goal of imitatio Christi is more conspicuous as the ultimate purpose served by the angelic theophanies.78 Nevertheless, Thomas says: For among all the mind’s exercises for the ascent of the spiritual intelligences, this [careful consideration of the blessed, beautiful and wounded Christ] is the most efficacious. Indeed, the more ardent we are in his most sweet love, through devout and blessed imaginative gazing upon him, the higher shall we ascend in the apprehension of the things of the Godhead.79

By the late twelfth century, angels were fully assimilated “ethical, affective and intellective” models and guides to the devotional life.80

Tongues of Angels In Book 2 of his Moralia in Job, Gregory the Great had provided a vital clue as to how corporeal and incorporeal beings communicate. In so doing, he contributed, as well, to medieval discussions of meaning beginning with Augustine’s definition of speech, both as inward articulation and as uttered words, and as Verbum, God himself, as unmediated, transcendent knowledge and truth.81 This subject, alongside larger considerations of sensory apprehension, intersects with reading angels in works of art. Gregory reveals his understanding of the angels and their communication in his conception of dialogue between God and Satan in Job 7: 8 and his probing of: what sort of speech this is. For it is not the case either that the Lord, who is the boundless, highest spirit, or Satan, who is clothed with no bodily nature, expands the sack of the belly with a blast of wind in the human way, and brings forth the expression of vox through the organ of the throat. But when an incomprehensible nature speaks to an invisible nature, it is fitting that our minds should be lifted up from the ways of bodily speech to consider the sublime and unknown modes of inner speech.82

Outward speech, for Gregory, is an everyday phenomenon, but inner speech is ineffable. While Gregory’s locutio intima refers primarily to the Holy Spirit, he does link the locutio intima of inner speech with the

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communication of incorporeal beings such as angels and demons. By association, this inner speech also corresponds with the verbum of inward cogitation that is always concealed from others by the barrier of the body, and that is imperfectly delivered by the vox:83 To the eyes of others we stand here, inside the hidden places of the mind, as though behind the wall of the body; but when we desire to reveal ourselves, we go out as it were through the door of the tongue, to show what we are like within. But spiritual natures are not thus, not being composed in our double fashion of mind and body.84

God, Satan, the angels, and the souls of the blessed are all of such natures, and God speaks to each in their own language, to which they reply: Because bodies pose no obstacles between spiritual natures, God speaks to the holy angels by the very fact that he shows his unseen secrets to their hearts, so that in the contemplation of truth they might read what they ought to do. . . . Angels speak to God in another way. [. . .] The voice of the angels in praise of their creator is nothing more than the wonderment of inner contemplation.85

Free of the mediation of the body, angelic speech is direct and true, requiring no interpretive structures. After human death, however, and resurrection, and even though we will be reconciled with our bodies, “each one’s body will not hide his mind from the eyes of others.”86 In this, then, we will be like the angels. For Aquinas, the body was not the same kind of obstacle that it was for Gregory, for he acknowledged the body’s power and its beauty, even as he chose the self-sacrificing life of the friar. Among the many testimonies at his canonization hearings in 1319, witness was given that after Thomas had turned his back on a beautiful woman sent to tempt him while he was held captive by his family, two angels visited him in his sleep and bound him by means of a girdle to chastity. Family members outside his room were startled to hear him cry out in pain.87 Among only several artists, in c. 1338, Bernardo Daddi painted this scene in a predella panel with delicate specificity (Fig. 2). Aquinas also wondered about a new question: that of angels speaking to one another.88 In his Summa (1, 107, 1), he reflects that they might well have no need of speech, since their minds are not obscured from each other. “Exterior speech,” he says, “takes place by some sensible sign, as by voice or gesture or through some bodily member, as the tongue

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2. Bernardo Daddi, The Temptation of St. Thomas Aquinas (oil on panel) (1338) (38 × 34 cm) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/ Staatliche Museen/Joerg Anders/Art Resource, NY)

or the fingers: these things cannot apply to the angels,” who have no body.89 How, then, to account for 1 Corinthians 13: 1: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”? Angels, he decided, manifested with an act of will their “mental concepts” to each other as their mode of speech.90 For him, an angel’s speech and thoughts comprise abstractions: an intellectual operation . . . entirely abstracted from place and time: for our intellectual operation too takes place by abstraction from the here and now, except accidentally through phantasms, which do not exist in angels. But as regards what is entirely abstracted from place and time, neither passage of time nor distance in space has any impact. Hence distance causes no impediment to the angel’s speech.91

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Angels and human beings speak, however, in the same general way, both exchanging knowledge and expressing the will of the speaker, although not always both: Because truth is the light of the intellect, and the rule of all truth is God Himself; the manifestation of that which is conceived by the mind, in accordance with what follows from the first truth, is both speech and enlightenment; for instance, if one man should say to another: Heaven was created by God, or, Man is an animal.92

Among the angelic orders, those closer to God can enlighten those below them, but “not every [angelic] speech is an enlightening” (1, 107, 2):93 But the manifestation of those things that depend on the will of the person who understands cannot be called enlightenment, but only speech; for instance if someone should say to another, I want to learn this, I want to do this or that. The reason for which is that the will shaped [in a particular way] is not light, nor rule of truth; but participates in light; hence to communicate those things that exist by virtue of the shaping of the will is not, in itself, to enlighten. For it does not pertain to the perfecting of my intellect to know what you might wish, or what you might understand; but only what the real truth is.94

It is possible that unenlightening speech, both in angels and in persons, could distract the will from the highest goal of striving toward God.95 The “tongues of angels” could, then, for Aquinas, and as reported by Reginald of Piperno, be identified in three ways: as talk among angels; as angels speaking to human persons; and as a kind of human language.96 Gregory and Aquinas differed, then, for where Aquinas allowed that angels might happily chat to one another and that, conversely, human persons may, like the higher angels, enlighten each other, for Gregory, the verbum was truly the only means of speech between angels and the divine. While, for both, the human body is a barrier, at least until after the resurrection, for Aquinas, the body would always retain that goodness with which, as a creation of God, it began.97 For Aquinas, for whom angels certainly possessed “tongues,” it was will that guided an angel’s desire to communicate, and if he willed communication with another of his kind, then only his listener would hear. Behind this definition of angelic communication lay complicated theories of corporeal being and mental language of which the great Dominican was, too, of course, a

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pioneer. The angel grasped his object at once and in its fullness; this was a perfected and essentially visual operation. It is, for Aquinas, a failing in the processes of the human mind that leads us to construct words and sentences. The reverberations of such distinctions led later commentators to new interpretations, including interpretations of reading. For some writers, angelic locutio, the putting of thought into words, was equivalent to producing a spiritual ray that would be aimed at the addressee. In the realm of human language in the medieval West, there is, too, a provocative analogy to be made between the capacity for “pure abstractions” inherent to Latin, which was the scientific language of Aquinas, and the transcendent language of angels. As vernacular languages were reformed in response to the requirements of translating learned Latin prose, and then also as the vehicles for original compositions, they served the enlightening purposes of those “higher” minds in the human hierarchy.98 Thirty years after Aquinas’s death in 1274, Dante himself had made the case that gramatica, Latin, was not the sole language of enlightenment, for a renovated and mindful vernacular language, an “illuminated vernacular,” could also, as he puts it, both dispense and reflect light.99 At the beginning of his own treatise on language, Dante discusses the angels’ methods of signification, and their need (or not) for speech: Since the angels have a swift and ineffable capacity for expressing their glorious conceptions which is completely self-sufficient, whereby one makes itself known to the other either directly or by means of that resplendent mirror in which all are reflected in their beauty and in which all most eagerly gaze, they do not seem to have needed any speech signs.100 efh

Angels, then, comprise in their being both transparent communication and its sign. For the great Italian medieval intimate of the angels, Umiltà of Faenza (1226–1310), the actual ministry of the angels, their mission, makes them known to us but this is not so much in “seeing” as it is in “hearing” their song.101 Umiltà’s personal relationship with the angels is a special example of mediation, for she knew the names of the two guardian

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angels given her by Christ, Sapiel and Emmanuel, and she gave testimony to their substantial presence in her life, their appeal to her senses, and their identities as interlocutors and mentors, encouraging her devotion to the Virgin and the Trinity.102 Sapiel’s name means “Wisdom of God,” and he had been her companion since her birth; of powerful beauty, he wore gems and a many-colored coat. Emmanuel, whose name means “God is with us,” belonged to the highest heavenly courts. After a period of marriage and the birth of several children who died young, Umiltà and her husband entered a double monastery of the Augustinian Canons Regular. Following twelve years of withdrawal from the world with the Poor Clares and then to a solitary cell, Umiltà founded two monasteries for her Vallombrosan Order, the first just outside Faenza, in 1266, dedicated to the Virgin, and the second in Florence, in 1282, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist.103 After her death, the tradition grew up that an angel and God himself had dictated to her the nine Latin sermons for which she was known, in tandem with the convention that she was illiterate. The earlier sermons are doctrinal in spirit while the others are more meditative; the sixth sermon engages erotic topoi centering on her love of the Evangelist, “my counsel and the joy of my soul.”104 But it is the character of her socializing and dialogue with holy persons, including the angels, that sets her apart. In her fourth sermon, “On the Holy Angels,” and in others, Umiltà shows how keenly aware she is of the dimensions of notions of “speech” and “hearing” relative to persons, divine figures, and the angels. God talks to the angels, they talk to Umiltà, and she talks to her sisters – all modeling a pattern of dialogue and quiet listening “with a kind of ardent fever,” as she puts it, and imitation that integrates the actions of the angels with those of herself and her community. They participate thereby in a sacred conversation, or a “divine speech,” as Umiltà calls it, that is predicated on silent, joyful audition.105 The “grandeur” of the angels, specifically Sapiel and Emmanuel, the “darlings of my joy,” but also that of all angels, who are created in “the image of divine beauty,” earns her praise: God dignified them with every adornment, placing them above the firmament. God gave them knowledge of every science with which they might be servants and ministers of divine greatness. God gave wings to each, so that those messengers who carry extraordinary news of the most noble magnitude might fly quickly, crossing any barrier, reaching

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every height. For it is on account of their sublime beauty that they are the ministers of the Trinity.106

Umiltà notes the Nine Orders, “each named initially according to its own greatness,” but she is sure that every angel has a name, “a personal, individual name of great beauty.”107 Her own two, God-given “guardians” “have placed me, as it were, within the protection of their strong fortress. On my right and my left hand both angels hold me close, so that I cannot fall except through my own foolishness.”108 Umiltà’s sense of “hold” (tenere) applies equally to the reciprocal grasp, even cling, between herself and her angels and to the idea of “holding in the mind,” of knowing and thus, of contemplation.109 Sapiel is her soul’s “advocate” before Christ, and her “love is tested within me,” meaning that it is transforming, not that it is measured against hers. Emmanuel, on the other hand, who was “christened from the mouth” by St. John the Evangelist, is one of the Seraphim, and she only came to her after she was thirty and establishing her communities, her “flocks,” as she called them. She opened her wings, as Umiltà puts it, and helped her in this labor as an “interpreter of the dominion and power descending from the greatest heights.” Emmanuel stays in the “imperial courts of the highest heaven, contemplating the nobility of divine beauty. The clear spark from which divine love is inflamed is always burning within this angel, and since Emmanuel is most beautiful, she remains near the Trinity and must herself burn hot with the fire of beauty.”110 In an intriguing articulation of angelic ineffability relative both to the inadequacy and sacrality of words, Umiltà continues: And that name [Emmanuel], which is the verbal expression of her greatness, thrives and grows as the evangelist knew it would. It would be easier to count the drops in the great breadth of the sea than it would to say or to think or to see the magnitude of her goodness. And that name, her verbal expression, does not begin to be the equal of her supernal magnitude. I cannot tell you of her fullness; my mouth makes only the sounds of a stuttering baby.111

In her eleventh sermon, drawing on the imagery of Genesis, and the Cherubim with fiery swords who guarded the gates of Eden, Umiltà speaks of a sword-wielding angel who will put his sword in his right hand: at the first gate, the gate of my mouth. Constrain it against vain words, hold it closed against lazy speech, so that when such foolish words do

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wish to exit, they will not be allowed to escape. Sharpen my tongue with a piercing edge so that it may cut away vices and plant virtues to the praise and glory of the highest king and of his divine mother.112

Umiltà prayed to Emmanuel and Sapiel in her second sermon, in which she dwelt on the Annunciation. In a strikingly pictorial image, she begged: O holy angels of God and all Archangels, O Emmanuel and Sapiel, who are my angels, I pray to you, most sweet ones, that from all your powers you might assist me to picture the Virgin’s inner chamber before my eyes so that I may be able to contemplate Mother and Son and from her lap receive her child into my arms.113

For Umiltà, as for her scholarly contemporaries, numerology had a pervasive role. Like her, Bonaventure considered the perfection of the angels – a perfection that was at once absolute and relative – as embodied in the number three, which, in angels, is reflected on itself, super se reflexa.114 The perfection of the divine, as greater than that of the angels, means that only God’s unity can complete the Decad; nine, then, is an expression of the angels’ closeness and difference relative to God, and, equally, it signifies the greater comprehensibility of the angels to humankind than the Trinity, which is, over all things, the first principle.115 Among medieval mystics, such as Hugh of Saint-Victor, who accepted that number was the specific image of the Unknowable, examples of the Trinity could be discovered everywhere: in the Testaments’ three parts; in the hierarchies; in the theological virtues; and in the triplicity of the angels reflecting the Trinity.116 Distinguishing between Unity and Diversity, other phenomena are subject to classification: earth and heaven; visible and invisible; humankind and angels; subjects and prelates; active and contemplative; flesh and spirit; Eve and Adam; imperfect and perfect.117 For Umiltà, as for her contemporaries, the cosmos both as a whole and in its parts was governed by number, and in this, her perspective aligned with the larger tradition of Neoplatonism.

Dante and the Scholastics Dante, and Thomas Aquinas before him, stood on the shoulders of the scholastics of the early thirteenth century who had applied philosophy to the study of angels. Their predecessors in the twelfth century, in turn,

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around the time of the appearance of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, were just as concerned with establishing a syllabus for teaching systematic theology as they were with philosophical precepts; they occasionally appropriated Augustine’s doctrine of Creation simul as they tried to solve the riddle of how exactly angels are distinct from the deity.118 One early conclusion was that angels lived in time and are changeable, possessing a potential to learn and a capacity for emotion. Without being ubiquitous, like God, they are nevertheless sent out by him on missions.119 Peter Lombard himself (c. 1100–1160) identified with Augustine’s views on Creation ex nihilo, and on the creation of angels with heaven and earth. The writers of the early twelfth century accepted, too, not only that angels were spiritual creatures, but also that there was an angelic hierarchy of Nine Orders led by the Seraphim, whether or not these orders were a component of original Creation, a facet of the narrative that grew to be a matter of disagreement. These writers also understood the discrepancies between Gregory and Pseudo-Dionysius. Peter Lombard thought that the angels had different amounts of wisdom and will at Creation, but that the Nine Orders only truly emerged, and that their metaphysical natures were confirmed, once the fallen angels were expelled.120 Once fallen, as most of the early scholastics were eager to assert against the early theologian, Origen, Lucifer and the fallen angels had no possibility of salvation. As one strand of thought had it, since they were spiritual creatures, the angels were not subject to the same physical temptations or temptations outside themselves as human beings; thus, they did not merit redemption in the same way. The matter of their will, in either the good or fallen categories, was debated. Peter Lombard introduced grace into the discussion, for he decided that, like human beings before the Fall, angels, too, before their fall, were free to exercise their will. Still, so that they could grow in virtue, the angels needed grace, of which God had deprived the fallen. The parallel between the fall of the angels and that of humankind appears to be inevitable, although it seems not to be as prevalent an analogy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as one might expect. In the early thirteenth century, however, Prepositinus of Cremona weighed the ethical character of human beings before the Fall using angels as his measure.121 Human persons, like the angels, needed grace for their moral improvement. According to Lombard, the fallen angels retained free will and

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continued to choose evil. Both the good angels, who are perfect only in their encounter with God, as well as the fallen ones, keep growing in virtue and vice respectively, so that although the quality of the good angel’s love remains steady, its quantity increases.122 Lombard thought, too, that angels of all ranks were entrusted with divine missions, but that the highest ranks were chosen for the most significant of errands. Early writers tended to agree on the duties of guardian angels, who were pitted against competing individual demons who tempted their human charges. Minor topics among thinkers around the time of Lombard included the angelic and demonic incubi, and the question of the nature of the bodies angels occupied in their earthly manifestations.123 In the 1220s, William of Auxerre and Alexander of Hales introduced a revised set of angelic themes. William addressed in greater detail the virtues of the angels, which encompassed not only free will and the love of God, but also a morally inflected, natural self-love. Self-love meant, as he noted, humanlike qualities, such as the wish to live, knowledge of self, and self-protection.124 He thought, however, that the angels who fell did so because they had spurned God’s grace. He found in the notion of conscience, moreover, a way to understand the predicament of the fallen angels. Conscience comprises a yearning for the good and custody of reason even in the fallen state; Lucifer himself suffered remorse even in his alienation from God. The good angels invite William to produce a complex catalogue of their hierarchy, and, in recording this catalogue, he firmly posits the Pseudo-Dionysian order as described in the Celestial Hierarchy.125 Angels lack foresight, but they come to their knowledge through an immediate act of perception that requires divine illumination. William takes pains to distinguish between the prophets and the angels in terms of foreknowledge; the prophets’ knowledge is not as wide-ranging as that of the angels.126 Alexander of Hales focused more fully on the Aristotelian and metaphysical side of angels than William, attending to the kind of substance of which they were made and determining that they were a “metaphysical anomaly.”127 Rather cleverly, and in anticipation of Aquinas’s differentiation between essence and existence, Alexander turns to the difference between quo est (“essential character of being”) and its quod est (“current manifestation of its being”).128 God is exempt from this distinction. He does, as well, return to the problem of incubi, proposing

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that the children of angels and humans (as in Genesis 6) are likely to be a kind of hybrid. Like William, he examines the hierarchy in detail, suggesting that this topic was of great interest in the early thirteenth century. For him, however, above all, such questions had to be answered through Aristotle, and not through resort to explanations engaging either a distortion of Aristotle or religious mystery. In this, if we were to separate – anachronistically and falsely – theological from philosophical speculation, we might say that philosophy emerged as the dominant avenue of inquiry with respect to – or as an extension of – theological propositions. Born about forty years after Umiltà of Faenza, Dante drew, like her, upon long-standing theological and philosophical ideas attending angelic nature; his angels are at once familiar and utterly and unforgettably strange. They might be as intimately proximate as Umiltà’s lifelong companion, Sapiel, or pure metaphysical abstractions. Their character and their dwelling place in Dante’s cosmos and heavenly spheres, in which there is a heaven beyond the heavens, also evince a kinship with Augustine’s “almost-nothing” before Creation. In Paradiso, Beatrice will explain to Dante that the nine spheres and the angels relate to one another so that the inner sphere, or “ring,” comprises the first, most powerful seraphic order of angels, corresponding to the Primum Mobile as closest to God. The Cherubim belong to the sphere of Fixed Stars, and on down from the rings of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, and Mercury, to the pairing of simple Angels with the Moon. Dante’s great Empyrean lies beyond the sphere of the Primum Mobile and fixed stars, and it is the “‘cause’ of the phenomenal world in the sense that it is its ‘foundation,’ the ground of its being.”129 The Empyrean derives from Aristotle’s nothingness: “perfect, eternal, changeless . . . and dimensionless”; it was not only light-filled, as all later Christian commentators had agreed, but it was also, for Dante, an immaterial place of stillness and pure spirit where the souls of the blessed live.130 As Beatrice observes to Dante as he leaves the Primum Mobile, “We have gone beyond – from greatest sphere to heaven of pure light, light of the intellect, light full of love, love of the true good . . . ”131 At the end of his journey, when Dante arrives at the Primum Mobile, just inside the heaven of the heavens, his angels have by now assumed myriad forms and roles. In this lies great interest for their Renaissance genealogy.

The Divine Comedy

The nature of Dante’s angels is naturally inflected by his response to Thomas Aquinas, through whom he read Aristotle.132 Aquinas understood Creation much as Augustine had, too, and in a way that is also sympathetic to Neoplatonic and Pseudo-Dionysian perspectives: Creation as emanation, as light from Light in a sequence moving from the ineffable to finite existence, and yet always as participation in the One. This system was congenial to a degree to Aristotle’s cosmos of spheres moved by intelligences which, for Christians, were to become angels.133 To step back for a moment, it might be fair to say that from the late medieval period on, Franciscan thought, in Bonaventure, and Dominican thought, in Aquinas, were not aligned according to Augustine or Aristotle but, rather, according to “two unequally developed forms of Latin Aristotelianism.”134 As Pico della Mirandola later famously expressed it: “Without Thomas, Aristotle would be silent”; one might equally state the reverse.135 Dante would borrow from Aquinas’s angelology but he would also depart from it.

The Divine Comedy Angels populate Dante’s writings, although he treats them with greater theological specificity in the Convivio and in the Commedia. He furthers the thirteenth-century poetic convention, as well, in which a lady might be compared to an angel, as he does, for example, in the Vita Nuova, in which Beatrice herself, he reports, was likened to an angel. The angels sing “Hosanna” about the white cloud that carries her in a dream of her death, and, when Beatrice returns to the Garden of Eden (Purgatorio 30, 16; 22; 82), a hundred “ministers and messengers of eternal life” greet her, alighting from a processional chariot, showering her with flowers, and replying with Psalm 30: “In te, Domine, speravi.”136 Thinking of her after her death, Dante notes how he made drawings of angels on tablets.137 In his Convivio, he supplicates the angels who move, by their understanding, the Heaven of Venus, or planet of love; later (4, 19, 6–7), he proposes that humankind might even outshine the angels by reason of the “multiplicity” of the “fruits” of its nobility. He goes so far as to see affinities among Aristotle’s mover-intelligences, Plato’s Ideas, and even pagan gods and goddesses (2, 4, 2–8; Paradiso 28, 121).138 Angels of all hierarchies move the planetary spheres; for Aquinas, by contrast, only the ministering Virtues were assigned this task.139 In the Paradiso, Dante joins the planets

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and angels yet more intimately, for Beatrice asserts that planets and angels must have originated at the same time in Creation; more than this, and apart from the fallen angels, the multitude of hosts are responsible for the “art” of heavenly rotation (Paradiso 29, 44–45; 52–54).140 Human reason and angelic nature, as the most superior of created things, belong together; in this, he disagreed with Aquinas who taught that human reason only resembled the angelic, denying, further, in his Summa (1, 75, 7), that a human soul and angels were of the same species.141 Dante acknowledged (Convivio 3, 7, 5) that angels, unlike human persons, are absolutely divided from matter, and in this they are more pure and available to receiving intellectual truths. Dante often speaks of truth as the “bread of angels” which is also accessible to philosophers.142 Angels have unmediated and continuous understanding, without need of the human senses. Like Aquinas, he accepted that only God could be fully one with and equivalent to the work of understanding. Dante held the notion (Convivio 2, 4, 4) that angels’ being is identical to their operation.143 This connects to his idea of angels as “pure act” (Paradiso 29, 33), which is in direct contradiction to Aquinas, for whom only God is “pure act.” Dante here repeats Averroës.144 Sight and light have the highest places in Dante’s metaphysics. When, in Paradiso, Beatrice speaks of the endless gaze of the angels upon the face of God, she expresses a leitmotif that prevails throughout the poem, namely, of sight as equivalent to the highest kind of knowledge acquisition. Strangely, Beatrice believes that angels have no memory (Paradiso 29, 81).145 Again, as for Pseudo-Dionysius and his followers, light is the leading metaphor of the divine. Dante likens light’s behavior to the angels’ understanding; they are also somewhat diaphanous, for they are absent of base matter (Convivio 3, 7, 3–5). Just as the sun pours its rays onto things, divine light, or the “Sun of the angels,” bathes the intelligences; their nobility, as Albert the Great concluded, is literally reflected in the degree of light that they send outward again, like mirrors, and in such a way that it is even hurtful to the eye.146 As an entity that is able to reason and that is also devoid of matter, the human soul can be divinely illuminated, like an angel (Convivio 3, 2, 14). For Aquinas, on the other hand, the soul is a union of spirit and body. In the Paradiso, God creates angels, the heavens, and matter, along with the generation of each human soul, and these are all eternal (Paradiso 7, 130–132; 142–144). By means of the rays of the stars that issue from

The Divine Comedy

angels, other created forms are born and die, but angels are not able to remake bodies into other bodies or forms.147 Angels cause the heavenly wheels to turn with “the art of the hammer,” rather than like the artisanGod who needs no tools, and the faults in matter are due not to the angels but to matter’s own mutable predisposition (Paradiso 2, 126–129; 8, 109–110). Nature, Dante says, operates “like the artist who along with the habit of art has a hand that trembles” (Paradiso 13, 77–78). Angels are like the artist’s craftsmanship, while the astronomical bodies equate with the trembling hand that is responsible for earthly flaws.148 In his debt to Pseudo-Dionysius’s hierarchies, Dante is nonetheless innovative in associating Aristotle’s mover-intelligences with those hierarchies such that each order moves each astronomical sphere.The Angels direct the moon, the Archangels govern Mercury, and the Thrones conduct Venus.149 As the ancients understood the heaven of Venus to instill love, so Dante links this love with that of the Holy Spirit, following Bonaventure’s articulation of the angelic triads contemplating the three persons of the Trinity.150 In Purgatorio, more than in Paradiso, the angels fulfill their roles as ministers: as the helmsman of the soul’s boat (Purgatorio 2, 27–29); equipped with green attire and blunt swords, they frighten away the serpent in the Valley of the Princes (Purgatorio 8, 25; 106); and one guards Purgatory’s gates while another will inscribe seven “P”s onto Dante’s forehead, later to be effaced by seven others.151 These angels resemble the demons of hell, and they resonate with the likes of Phlegyas and Charon; these dark angels are opposed by the white angels, and Dante occasionally calls both kinds “birds.”152 In the heaven of the Empyrean, angels minister to the blessed rather than serve as mechanics to the material realms, and their joyful celebrations in paradise are like those of a never-ending wedding feast, accompanied by games and song: And there I saw a loveliness that when It smiled at the angelic songs and games Made glad the smiles of all the other saints.153

Along a river of light, a spring gathering of flowers and glints of rubies can be seen (Paradiso 30, 64–66), much like Bernard’s account of the Cherubim who “pour forth a stream of knowledge to the citizens of heaven.”154 Drinking from these waters, both courts of heaven come

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more clearly into sight (Paradiso 30, 94–96; 31, 7; 13–15). The saints take their places in a great celestial rose above which the golden-winged, white angels, like bees, dip and hover. efh

The earliest illuminated manuscript of the Divine Comedy dates to 1337.155 The most sumptuous manuscript of the later period is that for Alfonso V of Aragon, King of Naples, in which the Sienese painter, Giovanni di Paolo, illustrated the third part of Dante’s poem. Among his representations for the Paradiso is his painting for Canto 28 (Plate III), in which Beatrice refers to Gregory’s angelological error, and pays homage to prescholastic cosmology. Here, in Dante’s account, the Empyrean is known as the “heaven of the Trinity”; it is from the vantage point of the Empyrean that the pilgrim observes the Trinity.156 Rather deftly, Giovanni accurately records Dante’s elision of the Empyrean and the Trinitarian world beyond. Related to Dante’s construct of a heaven beyond the heavens, which is akin to Augustine’s “almost-nothing” before Creation, is the poet’s revolutionary, if changing definition of angels whose ordinary habitat is the Empyrean. In Canto 28, Beatrice also expounds for her companionon the Dionysian orders, giving him a kind of grammar of the angels. Giovanni di Paolo responds to this here by portraying the Seraphim’s red wings around the Trinity, who is seated above a host of angels grouped into three, wearing pink, blue, and yellow. On the far right of the image sits Dionysius himself, balancing his Celestial Hierarchy on his knees. Angels, however, can also be, for Dante, simply “pure act” (Paradiso, 29, 33), an identity that Aquinas reserved only for God. Belonging to the immaterial places of the heaven, they are not dependent on matter; they are “intelligences.”157 Giovanni di Paolo showed the ninth ring, or Primum Mobile, as a ring of light composed of angels who emit golden rays. Within and over the circle stands Christ the Redeemer who gives the Primum Mobile its motion, initiating the spinning of the spheres within. The angels, for Dante, are like God who is “pure form or actuality . . . sheer intelligence-intelligibility (but not a thing in any sense),” and, too, they are like the human soul, a form not dependent on matter but united with it.158 Angels are intermediaries of a rarified kind: they are like mirrors, reflecting divine light through the created universe (Paradiso 29, 143–145), and also “divine birds” (“l’uccel divino”). Here, in the image of the mirror,

The Divine Comedy

Dante reveals again his debt to Dionysius, for whom the angels are “spotless mirrors reflecting the primordial Light which is God Himself.”159 Above humans on the ladder of being, they are associated with pure reason and contemplation. Eternal since they were made, they enjoy an uninterrupted sight of God.160 Dante’s angels belong to the family of Augustine’s angels, going back as far as the six “days” of Creation, which, Augustine thought, should be read not as a sequence in time but as a revelation of creative activity made to the angels that unfolds in ascending order from the angelic nature.161 The event of Creation was simultaneous. In contrast with Aquinas, matter and form for Augustine were created in one instant.162 As first in the hierarchy of created things, the angels are “spiritual” or “intellectual” creatures, signified by the lux (light) in Fiat lux (let there be light), a phrase on which Augustine often dwells in penetrating detail: “the two different societies of angels,” he said, are “not unfitly termed light and darkness” (City of God 11, 33). At the moment of the Fiat lux, the rebel angels fell.163 After her discourse on the orders in Canto 28, Beatrice sees in the mind of God that Dante still has questions, and so she tells him that the creation of angels by God was an act of pure love that took place before time began. Some angels rebelled. Giovanni di Paolo rather safely chooses this more traditional iconography to represent Canto 29 (Fig. 3). It is here, as well, that Beatrice announces that angels have no memory because they see everything through God, and it is here, in Canto 29, that she expounds on angelic mirrors.164 The Fall of the Rebel Angels is an entrancing subject in its own right, as such lights as John Milton and Pieter Bruegel the Elder have amply proven, and it invites, too, an Augustinian meditation on angels as light, and on the fateful decision of Lucifer and his fellows to part from God on the first day.165 For Dante, Lucifer and his kin fell “as soon as they were created,” “before you could count to twenty.”166 Their sin was pride, or superbia, for they refused to wait for light and so they fell, like unripe fruit (Paradiso 19, 48). These fallen angels, possibly a tenth of the host of angels, came from all orders; human souls were created to compensate for their loss (Convivio 2, 5, 12).167 Lucifer is among the several angels in Scripture, along with Gabriel and Michael, whom Augustine (as well as Dante) notes by name, but he also mentions others according to their

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3. Giovanni di Paolo, The Primum Mobile: Beatrice Continues Her Explanation of the Relationship Between the Universe and the Angels, Paradiso 29 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 181) (© The British Library Board)

mission.168 For him, too, although angels are the high point of God’s creation (City of God 11, 15), they were not created in the plenitude of happiness (City of God 9, 11); only by their will, and with God’s help, without which they could not stay in goodness, did the good angels deserve to stay in a condition of truth (perseverantiae).169 While he did not

The Divine Comedy

have available to him Aquinas’s distinction of essence and existence, he did conclude later in life that angels have spiritual bodies that are ethereal and light-filled. They move astonishingly fast and, in their true nature, are invisible to humans.170 Likewise, they can deploy material objects and even other bodies.171 When they appear to human persons, they represent God.172 Dante himself had reflected, too, on the problem of the intermingling of apparently frail, human qualities with angelic substance. Earlier in their path, Dante and Virgil had met the so-called neutral angels in the vestibule of hell (Inferno 3, 31–39): And I, in the midst of all this circling horror, began, “Teacher, what are these sounds I hear? What souls are these so overwhelmed by grief?” And he to me: “This wretched state of being is the fate of those sad souls who lived a life But lived it with no blame and with no praise. They are mixed with that repulsive choir [quel cattivo coro] of angels Neither faithful nor unfaithful [ribelli] to their God, Who undecided stood but for themselves [Nè fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sè fuoro]. Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, But even Hell itself would not receive them, For fear the damned might glory over them.

These angels “per sè” are the “lukewarm” angels, and as such, in John Freccero’s words, they are “more contemptible than the worst of sinners.”173 In their vestibule of hell, they consort with the souls of the cowardly, the undecided; in Dante’s words, those “wretches, who had never truly lived” (Inferno 3, 64–69). These miserable persons of the Inferno, who are stung to the point of bleeding by wasps and hornets, “never were alive,” as Freccero puts it, “since they failed to make the commitment which is the beginning of moral life. The single moment of angelic choice – by implication here, I think, as it related to the Fall – recapitulates the whole of man’s moral existence;” thus, he continues, angelology was the “‘control laboratory’” for the analysis of human action.174 Returning to the end of Paradiso, at Canto 30 and 31, Dante finds himself in a light-drenched world, but yet his sight grows stronger (Fig. 4). As he lets his eyes take in a river of light, what had at first

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4. Giovanni di Paolo, The Empyrean: The Celestial Rose, Paradiso 31 (Yates-Thompson 36) (fol. 185) (© The British Library Board)

appeared to be flowers become the souls of the elect, sitting in tiers of petals that grow larger in circumference according to their height, opening up like an immense rose, a rose that has a golden center or sea of light. The sparks have now taken on the shapes of nine angels flying like bees between God and the elect. Beatrice leads him to the center of the rose where she will take her own seat at the end. While Giovanni’s perhaps rather clumsy rose resembles more the poetic rose of earthly love, or even a heraldic rose, Dante’s celestial rose is infinitely more

The Divine Comedy

complex, both intangible and diagrammatic: it signifies Divine Love, an “amphitheater” of the elect, to be linked to the Passion and Mary.175 Nearing the end of their journey, Beatrice shows Dante another vision of the rose in which, in this manuscript, Eve lies at the Virgin’s feet. To the left is St. Peter, while, at the right, John the Baptist points toward the Christ Child. Beneath Eve, we see Saints Anne and Lucy and, disposed about the outer petals, Saints Francis and Bernard and a female saint. Seated at the lower right, in rose-colored vestments, is Augustine himself, only the second time that he comes on stage in the work. Yet although he makes only two brief entries in the Comedy – the first is in connection with light – the literary genre of autobiography, together with themes dear to Augustine, such as “rhetorical persuasion, reading practices, sign theory, journey, errancy, and conversion,” are central to Dante’s text.176 The subjective charge of these leitmotifs is mirrored in Sandro Botticelli’s fragile, even spectral metal-point, stylus, pen and ink drawings for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici’s manuscript of the Comedy, dating from the late fifteenth century (Figs. 5–9). Very much admired in their day, produced for a patron who was extremely sensitive to the aesthetic culture of his times, Botticelli’s drawings raise again these tensions between the literal and the metaphysical; the necessary compromise, looked at in a certain way, of committing to the identity of angels by rendering them in material shape. Beginning with his Chart of Hell, the drawings span the landscape of all three books.177 Hell is, here, Dante’s funnel-shaped cavity, at the top left of which the tiny figures of Virgil and Dante enter the “twilight country” before the river Acheron. This shadowed terrain stretches to the center of our world, vaulted by the crust of the earth’s surface. Immediately above, at right, is Jerusalem as the center of the earth. Here are hell’s nine circles shown in section, with the lowest degree of hell teeming with tiny souls in agony.178 Botticelli’s angels, including his fallen angels, conform to recognizable types. His messenger angels are among the most lyrical of his creations. In his drawing from Inferno 8 (The Wrathful, The Fallen Angels) (Fig. 5), the artist depicts Dante and Virgil descending on the banks of the Styx into the Fifth Circle where the Wrathful are punished. Mired in the sludge, beside the boat into which the two men step, the souls cry out in torment. In the lower left-hand corner, departing from their boat, Virgil moves toward the fallen angels, guardians of Dis, the inner city of

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5. Sandro Botticelli, The Wrathful, The Fallen Angels (Inferno 8) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Phillipp Alard/Art Resource, NY)

hell. Standing within the Gate of Iron, these damned angels refuse their entrance. God, Virgil reassures the perturbed Dante, who alone can deal with “essential evil,” will send a Messenger to throw open the gate. In AntePurgatory (Purgatorio 2), the little boat, which cannot settle on the water since spirits have no weight, reaches the shore. As the souls disembark, Virgil tells Dante to kneel before God’s Messenger, the Angel Boatman. A spirit asks the pair the way to Mount Purgatory, but on seeing Dante breathing, they recognize that he is still alive and rush toward him. One is Casella, Dante’s friend and a musician, who sings, but Cato hurries the souls along. Those who delayed in life, who were stubborn or careless, are punished by delay. Purgatory has its own important history. Defining its character offered the Church Fathers an opportunity to analyze variations of experience among the saved and the damned. Augustine made a simple division between them, but he acknowledged that the saved must have sinned and so, therefore, they needed purging of their flaws before coming before the beatific vision.179 Before Augustine, the Fathers taught two different beliefs: that there was a provisional state where the souls of the saved waited until they were joined again to their bodies at the Last Judgment, or that there was a process of purgatio that they

The Divine Comedy

must endure. Augustine thought that purgation had a “time and place” before the Last Judgment, which suggested that state later known as purgatory.180 Purgatory has long been a contested place in the doctrinal teachings of the Church. By the 1530s, reformers laid blame for the invention of purgatory at the feet of Pope Gregory himself, accusing him, as well, of facilitating a dangerous attitude toward image devotion.181 Although early representations of the place of purgatory may be relatively sparse, its essence could be conveyed in art by the actions of bodies and souls. Looked at in this light, the angels in the Dante illustrations have a crucial role, for it is really in purgatory that the angels are most manifest in Dante, perhaps, in part, because of their more numerous and burdensome administrative tasks. For Botticelli, the form of an angel was unquestionably female and, as Kenneth Clark once proposed, since there are few women in the Inferno, it was in Purgatorio that Botticelli allowed himself full expression. In Purgatorio 12 (Fig. 6), the scene of the Proud, the angel greets Dante and Virgil with an exquisite grace after they have passed the fall of a tiny tower of Babel, with Nimrod at its feet. They have been looking at the destruction wrought by pride – Satan transformed from the most

6. Sandro Botticelli, The Proud (Purgatorio 12) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Phillipp Alard/ Art Resource, NY)

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7. Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 28) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Phillipp Alard/Art Resource, NY)

excellent of angels to the monstrous; in the Inferno (34, 28), he has three heads of diverse colors and wings like those of a bat. The angel greets them with outspread wings and arms, and Dante is embraced. Then, at the foot of the staircase, the angel beats the tips of his wings about Dante’s forehead and, as the travelers ascend to the next terrace, Dante touches his brow to discover that one “P,” standing for the sin of pride, has been removed from it. They hear the angels singing. At last, in Canto 28 (Fig. 7), in the sphere of the Primum Mobile, Dante glimpses God as he and Beatrice are surrounded by the magical swarm of the Nine Choirs; this is a very different ideation when compared to Giovanni di Paolo’s rose. Along the right margin of the sheet (now partly cut away), as if to indulge that universal delight in identifying the angelic hierarchies, the artist has written the orders’ names and attributes.182 These he has also taken care to differentiate in his drawing. As Beatrice further explains the classification of angels in Canto 29 (Fig. 8), Dante listens intently, responding with an equal precision of gesture. Botticelli communicates certain elements of their relationship: Beatrice as a luminous and transforming embodiment of love, and Dante’s own inner transformation as they near the final sphere of heaven.

The Divine Comedy

8. Sandro Botticelli, The Primum Mobile (Paradiso 29) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Phillipp Alard/Art Resource, NY)

9. Sandro Botticelli, Saturn (Paradiso 21) (silverpoint) (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Phillipp Alard/Art Resource, NY)

In this cycle, Clark called the artist’s decision to depict Beatrice and Dante within the confines of a circle (Fig. 9) part way through the series “disappointing.”183 We are now stepping back in time in the journey, to Canto 21 of Paradiso, when the two ascend to the sphere of Saturn, the seventh

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heaven, to which the souls of the Contemplative descend from the Empyrean. Beatrice explains to Dante that her beauty grows stronger; were she to smile, the “radiance would destroy him.” The souls descend to a certain point, and then fly off as naked angels. Perhaps, however, the circle has a special relevance. Not only does it function as an intimate frame for what has become a profoundly interior spiritual relationship, but it also symbolizes the perfect spheres of which paradise is composed: the perfection of the divine through its most transcendent geometric form. When Botticelli portrays Dante and Beatrice’s passage to the sphere of the moon, he draws a smaller, concentric circle outside theirs that delineates the cosmos, with earth at its center and the outer rings of water, air, and fire. These elements, their boundaries, and their motions are pervasive in the universe, reaching to the fixed stars, to God’s heaven and his angels.184 In this way, as well, the identity of angels as air and fire, going back to Aquinas, joins them to the very fabric of the created world.185 The circle is both the literal and metaphorical embodiment of the cosmos. It is, then, too, an abbreviation for the concept of the heavens as celestial spheres, and an emblem for the angelic nature. For Pseudo-Dionysius, after all, the Beautiful and the Good, who have neither beginning nor end, are reflected in the movement of the angels, which is circular or spiral.186 His concept of the divine hierarchy, also as it was understood by his medieval commentators, was in truth more akin not to the structures of ladders or steps but to the circle, one that contains concentric circles within itself surrounding God at the very center. This same figure of the circle equally images the “hierarchy of the soul,” in the midst of which lies the soul’s core.187 Thus, the soul’s inner journey, as described by Bonaventure, for example, is not so much a motion of ascent or descent as it is an integrated, enfolding sequence of perfections, pulsing inwards and radiating outwards, each circle urging movement toward the self’s center where God resides in resonant analogy perhaps with the mandala.188 Even if the notion of hierarchy, which is an active, participatory one, cannot be wholly articulated by a representation or even by a vision, nevertheless, an artist’s imaging of it as a circle within which the angels consort with one another comes close to representing the separateness of the angels from us, the perfection of their dwelling place, and their kinship with the perfection of God.189 In the most important set of illustrations to Dante after Botticelli, the prints for Alessandro

The Divine Comedy

10. Giovanni Britto (attrib.), Paradiso 31, 4 (print), Dante/Con tauole, argomenti, & allegorie, & riformato, riueduto, & ridotto alla sua uera lettura, per Francesco Sansovino fiorentino (Photo credit: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)

Vellutello’s commentary on the Commedia, published in Venice in 1544, the artist chooses the circle most often as a frame through all three books. For Paradiso 12, 10, the blessed are encircled by angels within the Heaven of the Sun while, for Canto 28, 52, the ten spheres are portrayed as nine rings of angelic heads and wings surrounding God. The depiction of the Empyrean itself (Canto 31, 4) (Fig. 10) comprises two circular forms: both the mazelike ring of stalls of the celestial rose and, spinning above this, an angel-disk, like a lid, composed of the interlocking heads and wings of the angels fixed in the ether.190

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Outside illustrations to Dante, one of the most neglected and beautiful of Trecento images, from Guariento’s remarkable series for the palatine chapel of the Carrara family of Padua (Plate X), seems very much to the point.191 This striking panel represents the Dominations with their orbs and scepters. This kind of specificity relative to the Nine Orders and their attributes is rare; it is worth, then, inquiring why. efh

After the beginning of the fifteenth century, as part of the renascence of Neoplatonism among intellectual circles in Italy, and partly, perhaps, because of the sympathies between Pseudo-Dionysius’s metaphors of incorporeality and light and those of Augustine himself, the texts of the sixth-century philosopher enjoyed something of another revival. The specific iconography of his Nine Orders in the visual arts, however, remained relatively exceptional.192 By the time Lorenzo Valla would “unmask” the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus as apocryphal, artists had long portrayed a vibrant and disorderly multiplicity of angelic types.193 Valla was not the first to query the true identity of Dionysius, who had been mistaken as a contemporary of St. Paul, a man mentioned in Acts 17: 16–34. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) also shared doubts with Valla, his friend, and marveled that the Church Fathers did not mention him.194 These doubts did not prevent Cusa from urging Ambrogio Traversari to publish a translation in 1436, setting an example for Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who produced his own commentary and translation in 1492. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) remained convinced of Pseudo-Dionysius’s genuineness, believing that he passed on the wisdom of the Apostles that was contiguous with Plato’s religion.195 Ficino used an angelic trope in a political context in the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, when Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Aragon forged an alliance against Florence. While Lorenzo de’ Medici sent a mission to Naples late in 1479, Ficino put pen to paper. In a general affirmation of Dionysian hierarchical principles, he articulated his philosophy of love as a binding force in temporal and spiritual affairs. In this, too, he drew upon Dante.196 Styling his letter to Cardinal Giovanni d’Aragona as an oraculum by Giovanni’s grandfather, Alfonso, to his father, Ferrante, Ficino used the motif of the “language of angels” to underscore the unseen wisdom that must lie behind peaceful political

The Divine Comedy

resolution.197 This was not the only time that the Neapolitan régime engaged with the angels, for in an allegorical work celebrating Alfonso’s achievement of peace, Antonio Panormita included an angel who showered accolades on the king.198 Angels enacted secular and philosophical ideals through the century, even as they maintained their theological profile, and often in more personal as well as public settings. In 1450, for example, the Florentine humanist and merchant, Marco Parenti, wrote a revealing letter to his brother-in-law, Filippo Strozzi, then in Naples, outlining a complex iconographic program – “una fantasia a mio modo,” as he put it – for the silver buckle and tongue of a belt that Filippo had commissioned to have sent from Florence.199 Among the three groups of symbols Marco describes, he mentions a circle as a sign of himself to be placed on the belt’s tongue (adjoining an image of an armed monarch as an emblem of Naples); this was intended to convey time as made by the eternal rotation of the celestial bodies.200 Within this circle was an angel because, after the theologians, an angel drives each heavenly body. He allows, however, that philosophers and theologians name the same entity both “separated substances” and “angels.”201 Marco’s design of the angel and circle was likely influenced by contemporary Tarocchi playing cards which directly linked the heavens, such as the Primum Mobile, with an angel, much as Dante had.202 But while the corporeality or incorporeality of angels lay at the very heart of angelology into Dante’s day, an increasing preoccupation with their materiality, as opposed to their corporeality, arose. This different understanding of the nature of angels was generated by Aristotelian classifications of “substance” and “matter,” as we have seen. In his “substances,” Parenti alludes to these frames of reference, allowing for both sides. In a general way, he allows, then, not only for a Dominican definition of pure spirit, as represented by Aquinas, but also, more clearly, for an Aristotelian hylo-morphic view of form and matter, including spiritual matter, as argued by Bonaventure and many Franciscans.203 With marvelous exceptions, such as Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Last Judgment mosaic in the Baptistery of Florence of c. 1260, in which the orders of angels are identified, quite unusually, by inscription, the depiction of the Nine Orders as a collective is relatively unusual in later medieval and Renaissance art. The Orders do appear, however, in the

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11. Piero di Puccio, Theological Cosmology (fresco) (1389–1391) Camposanto, Pisa (Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

borders of the crossing vault of the lower church at Assisi; in the mandorla of Christ in the south chapel of the narthex at San Pietro, Civate; and around Christ in Judgment in Giotto’s fresco on the entrance wall of the Scrovegni Chapel. Between 1389 and 1391, Piero di Puccio painted a cosmic diagram, his Theological Cosmology, in the Camposanto, Pisa (Fig. 11). Here, the artist brought together a traditional, concentric scheme of the cosmos, ordered in seven circles, with the Nine Orders of angels, the pattern of whose wings lends movement and substance to their rings. Within the frame, God holds up the universe like a proud

The Divine Comedy

artist; at its center is the earth, containing a map of the three known continents, and around which are the rings of water, air, fire, the planets, fixed stars, and heaven, the province of the Prime Mover. Outside this last realm are the nine, colored circles of the angelic hierarchies, beginning with red for the Seraphim. In acknowledgment of their angelic learning, Augustine stands below, at the left, with Aquinas at the right.204 But the appearance of the Nine Orders in later centuries, and especially in monumental contexts, is unusual. In the late 1420s, for Martin V Colonna or for a patron within his court, Masolino painted an unusually specific garland of angels around the Virgin at her Assumption (Plate IV) in his altarpiece for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.205 Divided into three rings, they follow PseudoDionysius’s hierarchy as mediated by Gregory the Great, and they convey Pseudo-Dionysian attributes: the Seraphim of Divine Love at the top are (or were) in red; the Cherubim of Divine Wisdom in blue; in the outer circle, from top to bottom, the blue Thrones hold blue mandorlas; then, the red Dominations carry orbs and scepters; and third, the Principalities, protectors of religion and arbiters in the fate of nations, carry banners on which are emblazoned the Cross of St. George. Fourth, the Powers follow, in full armor with swords and shields; fifth are the Virtues, who work earthly miracles and hold scrolls inscribed with their names; finally, below, as messengers of God to humankind, the Angels play musical instruments.206 Later in the century, Lorenzo Costa (c. 1459/60–1535) portrayed the Nine Orders in an unusual version of the Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1499) (Plate V). The hierarchies are ranked at either side of the Holy Family whose rocky manger is set beneath an angelic group holding the instruments of the Passion.207 St. Joseph, who is presumably the figure on the right, and the shepherds had a special relationship with the angels since they alone, and simultaneously, heard the angelic harmonies.208 The link between Joseph and the shepherds resolves his many “perplexities” on discovering Mary’s pregnancy because, according to the sixteenth-century Milanese reformer, Isidoro Isolano, he was blessedly enraptured by the angelic Gloria.209 But it is really in connection with the life of Mary, as we shall see, and particularly accompanying her Assumption and Coronation, that the Nine Orders are shown, as full participants and witnesses to her divine and heavenly status. This will be especially true in the later fifteenth century, in examples such as

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Francesco Botticini’s rapturous Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1475–1476) (Plate VI) for the Florentine burial chapel of Matteo Palmieri in San Pier Maggiore. The Nine Orders, then, tend to appear from the late fourteenth century onwards in very particular iconographic contexts. The subject of the Assumption accompanied by the orders in Santa Maria Maggiore’s early altarpiece makes sense as a complement and pair to the Coronation in the apse, in which nine angels are ranged at either side of the Virgin’s throne. The portrait of Saint Gregory himself in an adjacent panel acts as a signature of sorts to the version of the Nine Orders that we see, and as he related it in his sermon on the Ascension.210 Gregory the Great’s legacy in the Renaissance is yet to be properly traced, but he continued to be remembered as a precocious proponent of the value of images for the illiterate. In his native Rome, he is a miracleworking saint whose visions, and their retelling in works of art, had a powerful afterlife.211 Gregory’s angelology, as articulated, for example, in his Moralia in Job, offered an important perspective, as well, on the matter of angelic conversation, the locutio angelica, and on the unique relationship, characterized in part by desiderium, among angels, demons, the soul, and God.212 Martin V might have recollected with satisfaction the long-held view that another keen angelologist and an Augustinian, Giles of Rome (Egidio Romano) (d. 1316), was thought to be a Colonna, and his own paternal ancestor. After 1422, at the small settlement of Riofreddo, a Colonna stronghold northeast of Rome, an unknown artist, likely the felicitously named Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, painted the vault of a small oratory attached to the hospital with a spectacular heavenly vision. The segregated bands of the orders here may be linked to other fifteenthcentury Roman representations that, as we will see in the next chapter, equally sought to allude to angelic classification. These include the Greek cardinal, Johannes Bessarion’s chapel at SS. Apostoli, where strong color, as well as location relative to the divine, carefully demarcate angelic difference and the terrain of mortal action.213 Bessarion himself, as a notable philosopher and humanist, was predisposed to accommodate the realm of the spirits not only because of the dedication of the chapel to St. Michael, but also given his erudite intellectual outlook. All three programs are linked by Colonna interests, if not by consistent rankings

The Divine Comedy

among the Pseudo-Dionysian orders. When, on his arrival in Dante’s paradise, the family’s putative ancestor, Gregory, saw the correct order of the angels, he chuckled outright at his mistake.214 Dante allied himself at this moment with the Pseudo-Dionysian orders; after all, as Beatrice comments, Dionysius gleaned his information from the Apostle himself. Coppo di Marcovaldo had completed his Baptistery mosaics only about five years before Dante’s birth.

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C H A P T E R TW O

WINGS: CELESTIAL VISIONS IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

Imagining Heaven And when they had proceeded they saw a high wall, unlike the others in beauty and splendor. For it was well built out of all the most precious stones, with different colors, and with metals placed between, so that it seemed to have gold for cement. Moreover its stones were crystal, chrysolite, beryl, jasper, jacinth, emerald, sapphire, onyx, topaz, sardonyx, chrysoprase, amethyst, turquoise, and garnet. With these and similar stones the shining wall roused the feelings of those looking in great love of the Lord. Without doubt Tundale went up to see the wall because “the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, nor has it entered into the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.” They themselves saw the nine orders of blessed spirits, namely the angels, archangels, virtues, principalities, powers, dominations, thrones, cherubim and seraphim. Moreover, they heard inexpressible words that a person could neither speak nor be permitted to speak. For the angel said to the soul, “Listen, child, and see, and lend your ear . . .1

To conceive of heaven, the high dwelling place of the angels, the saints, and the blessed, is to visualize a place. It is also, however, as medieval scholastics and homilists reminded their readers and listeners, to think of the invisible, the liminal, and the empirically unattainable. It is to recall, as well, the tenets of beliefs in the potentially petrifying judgment preceding the human soul’s entry. These are conundrums that govern the angelic world in all its aspects. Classifying and portraying angels depend on a conception of their unseen habitat, a habitat of which, in

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their essence, they are an inextricable part, whether descending or ascending, whether residing in rings around a divine core, or acting in their ministries as reflections of the operations of the soul itself. Such an elusive place as heaven is inseparable from the boundless potential of angels’ corporeal and earthly manifestations. Heaven may be defined as much for what it is – that is, for what we might know about it, as Eriugena might have said – as for what it is not. Early medieval artistic representations of heaven often combined abbreviated figurations of heaven and earth in which angels consort with mortals and the blessed at the edges of two realms. Alternatively, artists might delineate their settings schematically, as abstracted high places such as vaults – as in the golden canopies of San Marco, Venice, or Florence’s Baptistery – or simply as multiple, colorful mandorlas around divine figures. For Gregory the Great, the ministry of angels was inseparable from the ministry of human persons. For this reason, his angelic hierarchy, in contrast to that of Pseudo-Dionysius, began at the lowest level with the Angels and ascended vertically to the Seraphim, modeling thereby a symbolic ascent from earth to heaven, from humankind to God. “Clearly,” he stated in his Homily 34, “there are ways of human life that coincide with single orders of angelic bands. By means of a correspondence in virtue, these people are counted worthy of the heavenly city by sharing in the angelic nature.”2 For Hugh of SaintVictor, angels may only “stand” in God’s presence to the degree that they act on their mission to mentor their human charges.3 In these ways, like human persons, the angels must demonstrate and earn their celestial place. The ten concentric worlds of Dante’s heaven, as we have seen, were largely shaped by Aristotle, as well as Ptolemy, and conformed to the astronomical perceptions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For others, such as the charismatic Franciscan preacher, San Bernardino (1380–1444), heaven might comprise a varied terrain: the seven inner spheres of Dante’s heaven were contained in three concentric “heavens” which Bernardino called the firmament, the sphere of crystal, and the empyrean.4 The question of just what constituted heaven engaged later artists and their audiences as much as it did theologians, and, from the thirteenth century onwards, depictions of heaven resonated with their authors’ philosophical and worldly, as well as practical preoccupations.

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In many instances, artists and writers adapted Scripture, Church teachings, and local tradition to new and dazzling inventive purposes. It is possible that they did this in mutually influential ways such that the material realization of heaven informed a textual one, rather than the other way around. For Western Christendom, Augustine’s authoritative voice again proved fundamental, permeating as it did the teachings of medieval religious orders, the musings of philosophers and churchmen, and the creative impulses of artists and their patrons. The embodiment of heaven in several early artistic programs, beginning with Padua and the Roman ambient, introduces the home of the angels as an ontological destination. At the outset, however, we must note that heaven is indelibly imbued with the lights and colors, the geographical landmarks, and bodily sensations of heaven as it was conceived from Late Antique times onward, whether Greco-Roman or Near Eastern, whether Jewish or Christian, apocryphal or canonical.5 In this way, the symbols and destinations of the Temple, court, palace, city, garden, and school all have their part in figuring heaven and the actions of its angelic administrators.6 As the leading theologian of the West, Augustine’s notions again provide a helpful introduction, even if he came to change his views. As he grew older, from the early works until the City of God (413–427), his heaven became better furnished and more populous; the experiences of the body became more sensuous, and the journey there better lit. To think about heaven is to touch on his reflections on beginnings and endings; to look, then, from the vantage point of Creation as well as on those last things, the Second Coming and Last Judgment, that would come very much into focus in later sixteenth-century religious culture. As we have seen, however, Augustine – like his attentive reader, Dante – had entertained a catholic view of the angels; they might conform, on the one hand, to Pseudo-Dionysian categories or, on the other, they might possess more elusive and singularly original personalities. Augustine’s ideas about heaven and their intersection with Renaissance currents of philosophical reflection on the world of the spirit converge on the persona of the saint himself. Vittore Carpaccio’s famous early sixteenthcentury portrait of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472) as Augustine (Fig. 12) is bursting with Platonic allusions to the celestial spheres, to the perfected reaches of the afterlife, and, above all, to the incorporeal nature of light as the vehicle of revelation. While Jerome (c. 347–420), whose posthumous

Imagining Heaven

12. Vittore Carpaccio, St. Augustine in His Study (canvas) (1502), Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

advent into Augustine’s study is Carpaccio’s subject, is absent in this painting, the light issuing from the window and the row of three windows constitute important pictorial presences, possibly Trinitarian metaphors, for the ineffable divine and for heaven itself. In Augustine’s colossal Ennarationes in Psalmos (392–c. 418), which must have had a widespread, if still relatively uncharted influence in the Renaissance, Augustine had noted that “the eyes are windows of the mind” [“oculi . . . fenestrae sunt mentis,” 41, 7].7 And likewise here, a window admits the heavenly manifestation of Jerome who proceeds to admonish Augustine for his curiosity about heaven in words that parallel those of the Confessions.8 Jerome seems to say that the realms of faith and salvation are not truly measurable in the here and now, by bodily means; that, perhaps like a conversion experience, and like heaven itself, they are founded on higher principles in which the lower self must be abandoned.9 Such a Neoplatonic emphasis, which echoes the youthful Augustine’s outlook, reminds the viewer that Bessarion was also a well-known Neoplatonist. And in the background, in the contracted niche at back that suggests the glimmering mosaics of Venice’s San Marco, a six-winged Seraph, a member of the highest order, hovers above an altar on which stands the Risen Christ. For Augustine, heaven was a perfected destination for our perfected selves, one that he described literally and also by allusion. In his memorable

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epiphany with Monica at Ostia, and similarly in Carpaccio’s portrait, windows were not only a source of light but also metaphors for fleeting access to the beyond.10 The Ostia interlude is more hopeful than the earlier and famous conversion in the garden; for one thing, Augustine is more sanguine about the “goodness of bodies” promised by the resurrection, raising the question of the potential for shared goodness among souls, saints, and angels.11 Augustine has attained insight of the highest kind: surpassing carnal and spiritual vision to reach what he calls intellectual vision, and as if to say that if we could rise to “the silence where the Word of God speaks unmediated, and if we stayed there, rather than falling back to these shores – well, that would be heaven.”12 That moment at Ostia, recapitulated in part by the thirteenth-century letter on which Carpaccio drew, possessed a Neoplatonic resonance that was congenial not only with a Renaissance Augustine but also with contemporary philosophical speculation.13 According to Augustine’s theory of vision, what happens at Ostia is a manifestation of the highest kind of seeing: not corporeal vision, nor spiritual vision, but intellectual vision – vision that surpasses any kind of earthly referent.14 Second, that “seeing” itself, in Augustine, at its highest level, is akin to the essence of heaven, for they go together. In trying, for example, to understand Paul’s third heaven (2 Cor. 12: 2), Augustine outlined his view that, allegorically, Paul’s three heavens represent the three types of vision.15 Augustine’s meditations on heaven intersect with his views on angels and Creation, including the earthly paradise at the dawn of time; they also inform his perspectives on the heavenly paradise at the end. For medieval and Renaissance artists, these were equally rich themes that offered suggestive possibilities for formal and iconographic invention. These themes set the stage for the angelic drama that unfolds in medieval and Renaissance narratives. Augustine made a distinction, first of all, between the first earthly and last heavenly paradises. The heavenly paradise improved on the first, because innocence was at the end restored and human potential fulfilled.16 In heaven, the resurrected body conforms more to Christ than to Adam. This is a distinction that Michelangelo, for example, well understood, and one that he made over time, between the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and his altar wall. Heaven is, then, for Augustine, the city of God at the end of time, but it is attainable now for those on earth who “live in Christ.” On becoming

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

“blessed souls,” these persons will “receive the beatific vision,” this being a term, however, that postdates Augustine himself.17 Since heaven, like God, is ineffable, Augustine uses a “metaphorical ontology: the establishment of divine truth through metaphor.”18 These metaphors tend to active concepts, such as praising God eternally, and becoming perfect in an ongoing way.19 What we see in Augustine, in fact, is a kind of hesitation to describe heaven exactly, especially earlier in his life; rather, he describes our human need for heaven. At the outset of the Confessions (1, 1), for example, he tells us, famously, that “our heart does not rest until it rests in God;” in the City of God (10, 3), he observes that “God is the font of our beatitude and the goal of our desires;” at the end of this work, he says that we shall “rest and see, see and love, love and praise” (22, 30). Carpaccio evokes two species of heaven: on the one hand, the Seraph in the apse belongs to the long-standing iconography of the Nine Orders in which, as the highest order, the Seraphim reside closest to the divine. On the other hand, the thirteenth-century text adapted by Carpaccio to the cluttered study of a contemporary humanist-scholar is congenial with more secular, fifteenth-century theories about the spirit and the good life in relation to mortality; these theories transcend literal expression. Put another way, Carpaccio allows a glimpse of heaven in the here and now by asserting precisely its opposite, its very inaccessibility. The Nine Orders as a collective, then, as we have noted, appear in quite particular circumstances in the Early Renaissance, and their iconography – in an exceptional cycle in Padua, in several instances in Rome, and in isolated Marian subjects – reveals the special complexions of their patrons’ interests. These projects often share one notable aspect, namely, that the orders of angels appear in juxtaposition with earthly subjects so that the earthly and heavenly schemas are at once interdependent and distinct. These programs, with each including a revival of archaic angelic codes, represent one direction in the Renaissance story of the angels.

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome In the 1350s, the Paduan painter, Guariento di Arpo, completed an ambitious decorative scheme for the palatine chapel of the Reggia, the seat of Padua’s ruling dynasty, the Carrara. The artist’s cycle of paintings,

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comprising both wall frescoes and panels, constitutes an original, multimedia project for the medieval period, and it signals not only a milestone in Guariento’s career but also a decisive moment in the history of the Carrara family’s cultural patronage. On the chapel’s walls, the artist depicted two tiers of subjects in fresco drawn from Scripture; along with these, in a sequence of over thirty panel paintings, he portrayed a celestial vision: the Virgin and Child accompanied by Four Evangelists, surrounded by the hierarchies of angels (Plates VII–XI; Figs. 13–15). He accomplished this with extraordinary coloristic effect. The full cycle was dismantled in the late eighteenth century, and the surviving frescoes of the west wall are now part of the renovated meeting rooms of the Paduan Academy, for which one wall of the chapel was demolished. Most of the tempera panels, including twenty-nine representations of the orders of angels, are now in Padua’s Musei Civici.20 The program exemplifies Guariento’s debt to fourteenth-century Venetian artists such as Paolo Veneziano, as well as to Byzantine models, evident most especially in the linear style of his Virgin and Child. Guariento’s angels, on the other hand, reveal a newfound and expressive maturity evocative of the Gothic tenor of contemporary Venetian sculpture, and they are prophetic of the artist’s celebrated (and now mainly lost) Paradise for the Palazzo Ducale in Venice of 1365–1368.21 The biblical episodes convey, for their part, an acute psychological observation and an innovative, even theatrical presentation, aided by a characteristically lively architectural invention that distinguishes Guariento from Giotto, even as it recalls his more famous Trecento predecessor. Two themes are at least as important as Guariento’s striking, even idiosyncratic formal language: first, the question of the reconstruction of the chapel’s interior, and, second, the theological intellection governing the decoration as a whole. In 1765, before they were dismantled, the panels were described as located on the ceiling (“del soffitto”) with the Virgin at the center and the Evangelists at the four corners (“ai Quattro angoli”). Later scholars have proposed two solutions for the relationship between the frescoes and panels, neither of which seem to have a precedent: first, that there was a grand polyptych against one wall (although this is contrary to the eighteenth-century evidence), and, second, that the panels comprised a ceiling design within an encompassing vaulted scheme. In this second arrangement, the Virgin would have been located as a kind of

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

13. Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Soul (panel) (82 × 58 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) (Photo credit: By kind permission of the Comune of Padua – Assessorato alla Cultura)

keystone at the center. In this hypothetical context, four trapezoidal panels were situated within sections of the vault defined by its ribs.22 Even less has been said about the choice of biblical narratives, let alone their remarkable relation to Guariento’s carefully conceived definition of

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angelic nature. The chapel and its reconstruction invite consideration of two kinds of questions: the first has to do with the painted illusion of the celestial realms, with the observer’s encounter with the angelic, and with the operations of color and light in the fictive heavens. These themes bring to mind a challenge at the heart of artistic practice, namely, the evocation of the otherworldly and invisible through persuasive naturalistic means.23 The second, related – but more speculative – kind of question has to do with how apparently unlike artistic programs might be linked to one another; that is, how far can we go in positing congruities among works of art across time, even into the sixteenth century? From this perspective, Guariento, likely in consultation with his patrons and advisers, devised a scheme that presages the grand pictorial ensembles of the Renaissance. Guariento’s biblical episodes commenced at the upper level of the east wall, to the right of the altar. Visitors to the chapel probably entered through a doorway in this eastern wall, one that led to and from the palace’s guest quarters. Only two fragments of fresco from the east survived the eighteenth-century renovations: those of Adam and Eve before God (Gen. 1: 27), and Joseph interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh (Gen. 41: 15–16); these probably belonged to the lower level. The frescoes opposite these, on the west wall, survive in better condition, beginning with the story of Noah (Gen. 9), Noah’s benediction by God after the flood, and his subsequent drunkenness. At the center of the west wall, we see Abraham’s encounter with three angels (Gen. 18: 2) (Plate VII). There follows the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 19: 24) in a scene of devastation surveyed by two of Abraham’s angels, after which we see the figure of Lot’s wife – Lot having entertained the angels – transformed into a statue of salt (Gen. 19: 26). Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22: 9–14) succeeds this scene. After this, finally, we see Jacob in the company of Joseph, who is sold by his brothers into slavery (Gen. 37: 28). Below these events, on this wall and moving toward the altar at the north, the sequence begins with David’s victory over Goliath, and the judgment of Solomon, followed by the abduction of Elijah (42 Kings 2: 11), who is sky-borne in a fiery chariot conveyed by angels. The chariot supplies an elevated reference perhaps to the Carrara wheel emblem. There follows the story of Daniel’s three companions, Ananias, Misael, and Azarias, who refuse to worship an idol despite Nebuchadnezzar’s

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

threat to throw them into a burning furnace, and an angel must rescue them (Dan. 3: 17–49). Adjacent to this miracle, Judith decapitates Holofernes (Judith 13: 10).24 In many of these scenes, Guariento emphasizes angelic witness and angelic intervention (with Abraham, Isaac, Elijah, and Ananias), and he also selects incidents in which heroic individual action (Abraham, Joseph, David, and Judith) will ensure the salvation of a chosen people. The painter’s inclusion of the Book of Daniel is intriguing in this way, since archangels play key roles as intermediaries, counselors, and saviors. Daniel’s book (7–12) privileges visionary encounters in which angelic communication plays an important part. Gabriel must explain Daniel’s second vision of the figures of animals to him; in the third vision, he appears again as Daniel beseeches God for the fulfillment of his promises of mercy to Jeremiah. Gabriel explains how the seventy years of desolation should be interpreted. Daniel’s fourth vision ends with a statement as to how Michael, guardian angel of Israel, will save the people. The outcome of the Azarias narrative in Daniel also depended on a divine messenger’s salvific intervention, thereby reinforcing the larger symbolic meaning of Nebuchadnezzar’s story as a prefiguration of the universal kingdom of a Messiah. The Carrara lords might have claimed that their rule of the Paduan territories was permitted by divine agency and divine right. For them, Guariento’s themes were robustly affirming, particularly in light of the visit to the city of the future emperor, King Charles IV of Bohemia, in November 1354. He lodged at the Carrara palace as a guest of his loyal imperial vicars, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was a fitting beholder of these scenes.25 The family’s princely aspirations are reflected, too, in the tapestry-like articulation of the wall surface and in the elaborate settings of medieval townscapes, architectural ornament, and refinements of armor and costume. Guariento’s heavenly assembly of angels, by contrast, is a pictorial homily on their orders as these were formulated most notably in the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius: in descending order, the artist enumerates the Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations (or Dominions), Virtues, Powers, Principalities (or Princes), Archangels, and Angels. Oddly absent is the highest order, that of the Seraphim, although it is possible that they framed the damaged panel of the Virgin and Child. We

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14. Guariento di Arpo, Angel with a Lily and Two Kneeling Figures (Virtue) (panel) (80 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) (Photo credit: By kind permission of the Comune of Padua – Assessorato alla Cultura)

begin with the lower Angels (Fig. 13) whose attributes are the small bodies of souls; the Archangels hold balances, weighing souls (Plate VIII); the Principalities hold shields and lances (Plate IX), while the Powers walk chained demons. The Virtues grasp lilies (Fig. 14) and act in aid of humankind with miracles. The Thrones sit on marble seats, with scepters and orbs (Fig. 15), and ten Dominations, seated within rainbow mandorlas, have orbs and batons ornamented with lilies (Plate X).

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

15. Guariento di Arpo, Angel Enthroned with Scepter and Orb (Throne) (panel) (90 × 57 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua) (Photo credit: By kind permission of the Comune of Padua – Assessorato alla Cultura)

Twenty-two of the panels are rectangular, while five have slanted sides or triangular shapes. Unfortunately, the panels have been cut down so that these variations may have no relation to their original context. The panels of angels of the same order are generally of the same height; the triangular panels are taller then these, and those showing groups of

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angels are the largest of all. Whereas all of the full-bodied angels are set against blue backgrounds, the paintings of the Virgin and Child and the Evangelists have gold backgrounds, as do two smaller images of the Cherubim. As befitting their association with Divine Wisdom, the Cherubim hold discs on which are inscribed “PLENITUDO SIENCIE” [sic] (“fullness of knowledge”), after Pseudo-Dionysius. These two images, and perhaps others of their kind, may have framed the Virgin, flanking their superiors, the Seraphim. Perhaps most revealing is the fact that all of these figures are clearly not to be read in any way di sotto in sù. Rather, judging from the directions of their bodies and the gentle, rhythmic inclinations of their heads, they are to be read from one side to another, left to right or right to left. They invite, then, to be read as if they had been set as a series of panels along the walls, above the frescoes, and just below the ceiling proper. This cycle of angels has no precedent in terms both of its scale and its relationship with a mural scheme, which begins, thematically, and according to Early Christian tradition, to the right of the altar. In Padua, however, there was an early Trecento precedent for the ranks of angels. This was in the Cappella Angelorum of Padua’s Augustinian church of the Eremitani. Here, an unknown Venetian painter executed a now-destroyed diagram of the orders of angels alongside the Last Judgment. These angels also followed the nine hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius.26 At the Eremitani, as at the Reggia, Cherubim carried the Pseudo-Dionysian text on roundels on their chests; the Thrones were seated on rainbows within mandorlas. The Virtues performed three kinds of miracles, including curing the infirm and exorcising demons. These angels stood before abbreviated natural forms – a plant, animals, and the ocean – each of which resonated with the sequence of Creation. Their type recalls the angels at hand during the days of Creation in the thirteenth-century mosaic cycle of the Creation cupola in the atrium of San Marco in Venice.27 Even more apt is a comparison with the dramatic mid-Trecento orders of nimbed angels in the Dome of the Angels of the Baptistery of San Marco (Fig. 16).28 Intended as a mortuary chapel for Doge Andrea Dandolo (1343–1354), the iconography of the angels here recalls the ninth-century Mass still in use for the souls of the dead, in which God asks Michael to liberate the souls of the deceased. The Powers at the Eremitani wore priestly vestments, such as dalmaticas and stoles, while the Principalities were lavishly armed

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

16. Domination (detail from Dome of the Angels), Baptistry, San Marco, Venice (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

(as they are in Venice). In the chapel at the Reggia, in the only other surviving panel of a group of angels, the Principalities on their ribbon clouds are similarly equipped (Plate XI).29 In addition to the mosaics at San Marco, Guariento had another magnificent precursor in the mid-thirteenth-century mosaics of the Baptistery of Florence. Although he was well-traveled, however, we have no firm evidence that he went to Tuscany. In the Baptistery, and flanking Christ (whose book reads “CREAVI DEU[S] ANGELOS”), are the orders of angels in pairs. They are also identified quite unusually by inscriptions ringing the days of Creation. As to the question of who might have had a

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role in collaborating with Guariento as courtly adviser, Petrarch’s name inevitably emerges. In the late 1360s, with his last patron, Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, Petrarch likely contributed in an advisory capacity to the decoration of the palace’s famous Sala Virorum Illustrium. Perhaps he also had some part in the earlier scheme in the chapel and in its typological design.30 Later, in Venice, Guariento chose to depict angels with great specificity in his glorious and largely lost Paradise in the Doge’s Palace (1365–1368). Here, too, the passage of the human soul was key. When Tintoretto came to paint his great canvas of c. 1588, a masterpiece that supplanted Guariento’s fire-damaged Venetian fresco, his angels guided the souls of the blessed with a measure of emphasis and panache (Plate XII). He also portrayed representatives of the Nine Orders with their attributes, such as scales, orbs, and lilies. They do not, however, physically carry their charges, as did Guariento’s angels; rather, they guide, lead, and coax. This was the artist’s response, perhaps, to the mid-sixteenth-century climate of speculation – speculation in which Augustine’s voice had a major part – on the matter of the soul’s justification. It is tempting to see an Augustinian impulse behind each Trecento chapel’s decoration, particularly given the Augustinian presence in Padua. The city was, after all, a vibrant intellectual center in the later medieval period. The Augustinian, Giles of Rome (Egidio Romano), who was the author of several later thirteenth-century works on the measure, cognition, and composition of angels, had been in Padua in 1281 when he attended the meeting of the Augustinian General Chapter.31 Among Giles’s studies was his treatment in at least two treatises of the distinction between essence and existence as these categories had been defined by Aquinas. This distinction had far-reaching consequences for the intellectual framework of medieval angelology.32 In adumbrating other programs, namely, those at the Eremitani and at Venice’s great basilica, Guariento associated the Carrara with their influential neighbors: with their own town’s powerful mendicant presence, and with the Venetian republic’s long line of doges. Within the walls of their residence, the Carrara claimed the protection of the angels in this life and the next, linking their right of rule to that of the Bible’s kings and heroes who had been rescued in desperate and dangerous circumstances by God’s elite emissaries.

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

For their part, the Colonna family, who counted Giles of Rome among them, had long been sponsors of angelic schema in works of art. In the fifteenth century, at the family enclave outside Rome, at Riofreddo, in the vault of a small oratory, an artist who was likely the felicitously named Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino frescoed a colorful diagram of the winged and whirling circles of heaven. This commission joined that of the better-known altarpiece for Santa Maria Maggiore, long connected to the Colonna circle (Plate IV). efh

In 1422, the citizens of Riofreddo completed the building and restoration of the oratory of the hospital of SS. Annunziata.33 Located at the foot of a hill in this small commune northeast of Rome, and dominated by the Colonna castello, the shrine and its decoration offered visitors and residents alike a carefully structured presentation of the biblical mysteries. The patron of these works, Antonio Colonna, may well have had the close collaboration of the pope himself, Martin V Colonna, not only given the Colonna’s seigneurial rule of Riofreddo but also because Martin was an active promoter of angelic subjects. In any event, the project of building and decorating the hospital coincided with a golden age for the Colonna at Riofreddo. On many occasions in the later medieval period, and until the accession of Eugenius IV Condulmer in 1431, they distinguished themselves from other branches of the family for their loyalty to the papacy.34 Arcangelo himself was in Rome in 1422 and received there a now-lost commission from the pope, and he may also have collaborated with Gentile da Fabriano on the innovative early mural decoration in the nave of San Giovanni in Laterano.35 In both iconography and style, the Riofreddo frescoes can be connected to Masaccio and Masolino’s famous altarpiece for Santa Maria Maggiore, which was also a commission linked to the pope and dating to the late 1420s. The facial features of Christ in the oratory, for example, bear the same smooth, rounded treatment as Masolino’s figures, such as his Virgin on the panel, and the architectural specificity of the Annunciation might be compared to the same artist’s frescoes in San Clemente.36 Behind the altar of the oratory, the Annunciation unfolds within an architectural complex that dominates the figures. Gabriel alights at a

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white Romanesque building adjacent to the Virgin’s roseate temple on the right. On the ceiling above the Annunciation, two Church Fathers, Jerome and Augustine, sit across from one another in their studies, in the company of the Evangelists, Matthew and John, who are seated beside them. With his calibrated, blue wings, the angel of Matthew offers a salutation to his saintly charge against the backdrop of the red heaven that links him, the Fathers, and Evangelists to Christ enthroned in the center of the vault. At the other end of the oratory, on the entrance wall above the doorway, Arcangelo painted the Crucifixion, in a rocky setting, beside which are Ambrose, who shares his study with two women, and Gregory, next to Luke and Mark respectively. They, in turn, flank Christ in his heaven on the far side. The painted architecture and scholarly furnishings, as well as the simulated cornices, colored moldings, and tapestries along the walls, and the deep, unifying blue and rose hues across the surfaces, must have once provided an impressive context for the divine figures at the vault’s center (Plate XIII). These are the real focus and bright fulcrum of the composition. Seraphim flank Christ, who is encircled by four turning rings of angels, beginning with the Seraphim, then the blue wheel – probably the Cherubim – of the next order, who peer, too, from beneath his feet. Each circle has a subtly delineated edge while the faceted second ring, suggestive of a mandorla, shares the scales and prismatic brilliance of the angels’ wings that are ubiquitous throughout the schema. These wings, in turn, share a likeness with a late thirteenthcentury fresco in Rome, the pronounced and beautiful mosaic-like rainbow effects of Pietro Cavallini’s angels’ wings in his Last Judgment in Santa Cecilia.37 These edges, together with the wider aureole, which shifts by way of small lozenge shapes in color from blue to red with the light, endow the angels’ rings with a hint of dimension, a sculpted quality that is enhanced by raised plaster and gilding in the halos and the border of Christ’s robes. This sculptural quality is perhaps not by chance, for these circles compare to the voussures of medieval sculpted portals, such as the southern portal at Chartres where, in the five curved arches of the Last Judgment, a series of angels accompany the depiction of last things.38 In all, at Riofreddo, there are four angelic wheels, including the inner domain of the Seraphim. Outside these spheres, the last order of angels,

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

or Angels in the Pseudo-Dionysian or Gregorian sense, float free, hovering in the red heavens at the circumference, holding human souls. In the region of the Angels, as well, a round sun hovers. Three of the orders hold attributes, for the Cherubim carry red-bound books, the Dominations have orbs, and the Principalities grasp their scepters. The angels in the outermost circle, perhaps representing the Powers and Virtues, are distinctive mainly for their lively gestures and foreshortened expressions, for they point above and look below as if in ardent conversation with one another about the heavenly theater around them. They seem to express a potential for interaction with their neighbors and the world below. This angelic sociability is further evoked by the grouping of angels within their rings, since the Cherubim are paired with Thrones, and the Dominations with their orbs are paired with Principalities and their scepters. Each of these is in groups of three, while the Virtues and Powers in the outer ring, in the act of blessing, are arranged as pairs.39 One lost fresco program in fifteenth-century Rome constitutes a sequel to the Riofreddo works. In San Clemente, in the 1430s or 1440s, Giovenale da Orvieto executed a fresco of the Trinity surrounded by the hierarchies of angels, and he left both roughly painted inscriptions and a signature.40 In hierarchy, the order of angels more closely follows Gregory than Pseudo-Dionysius, although even so, it is not exactly parallel for the Principalities and Dominations have changed places. More in keeping with Gregory here, however, are the free-floating Angels whom the pope likened to Archangels in their role as messengers, the difference lying in the weight of the message.41 For each kind of angel there was an answering kind of human being. As a whole, the cycle in Riofreddo eloquently magnifies the theological significance of the Annunciation to which the foundation was dedicated. The encounter between the Virgin and angel transpires at the east end amidst an architectural splendor that belies the simple structure in which it is painted. If the Annunciation, as a Marian feast, glorifies the Virgin, it is also a feast for the Archangel Gabriel whose astonishing arrival sets in motion the Christian believer’s journey to redemption effected by the Passion. Gabriel is, then, the preeminent agent and symbol of divine mercy and intervention in human affairs, and his mission and its ramifications are ratified by the Evangelists and Church Fathers who are cleverly paired. It is not by chance that Jerome and Augustine sit by the

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Annunciation, nor that Ambrose, as ministering bishop, and Gregory the Great, as angelic expert (and Martin V’s remote predecessor), flank the Crucifixion at the doorway. Matthew’s angel, on the other hand, seems simply to have strayed from his immediate confrères to inspire his appointed apostolic scribe, while John draws his own inspiration from the visionary revelation beside him. The vault of heaven is an abstracted place that yet contains material volumes that catch the light and spiritual forms who behave with human emotion; a union, then, of the utterly remote and supersensible with the tangible and sensible. efh

Fifteenth-century artists in Rome and its territories audaciously combined earthly and heavenly realms, harking back to older representational conventions in their use of schematic celestial motifs and disembodied patterns. This was perhaps a way of asserting the enduring authority of their inventions. One such cycle initiates a brilliant series of Roman experiments in adumbrating the relation of earth to heaven. From 1464 to 1468, Antoniazzo Romano, with help from Melozzo da Forlì, decorated the Chapel of Sant’Eugenia in SS. Apostoli for Cardinal Bessarion, whose titulus that church was. The chapel was not rediscovered until 1959, immured as it had been between Palazzo Colonna and SS. Apostoli, where it had once occupied the right transept. Intended as Bessarion’s funerary memorial, the chapel’s full dedication was to the Virgin and SS. John the Baptist, Eugenia, and Michael, although it is referred to in the artist’s contract as the “Cappelle Sancti Angeli.”42 The vicissitudes of subsequent building programs in the church, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, as well as earlier damage caused by flooding and then the Sack of Rome, have meant that the recently restored frescoes are now only accessible and partially visible through a narrow opening in the nave. In addition to the extant stories of St. Michael, the decoration probably also included episodes dedicated to SS. John the Baptist, Eugenia, and Claudia.43 Above Antoniazzo’s panel of the Madonna and Child (c. 1467) on the altar, which was also painted for Bessarion, two vivid frescoes depict miracles performed by the chief among archangels, Michael, who commands an immeasurable importance for Renaissance Rome (Plate XIV; Fig. 17). Above these arresting scenes, in the half-dome of the apse, Christ is

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

17. Antoniazzo Romano, Miracles of St. Michael and Nine Orders of Angels (detail) (fresco) (1464–1468), Chapel of Sant’Eugenia, SS. Apostoli, Rome (Photo credit: Alessandro Vasari, Foto Vasari, Rome)

enthroned amid a colorful polyphony of angels arrayed according to the Nine Orders, as if to give testimony and collegial witness to the Archangel’s miracles below. Above them, in the spandrels of the vault, the Evangelists and Greek and Latin Church Fathers sat in groups amid fields of blue pricked with gold stars. While most commentators have focused on the unusual subjects and captivating realism of the St. Michael episodes, the chapel’s ultimate meaning derives from the juxtaposition of narrative with the serried orders above, and from the stylistic and symbolic difference – a visual tension – between a hieratic schema and the landscapes, portraits, and anecdotal detail underneath.

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The Nine Orders were painted with attention to the boundaries of their realms and to the colors that mark those boundaries. The Seraphim, in red, form the mandorla of God the Father, whose robes (as at Riofreddo) overlap their field; the Cherubim, in blue, follow with the central and lowest among them standing frontally, looking down over the chapel from the edge of the painted cornice. The Thrones follow, in gold, after which are the Dominations who are dressed in bright green with red wings, carrying batons or lances. The Dominations are fullfigured angels, distinct from the six-winged Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Thrones of the first triad. Next are the Virtues, in purple, who respond eagerly to their kin, the Dominations; then follow the Powers in red, brandishing banners, who complete the second triad. The multicolored and armor-clad Principalities succeed these, adjacent to the Archangels in yellow and the now partially obscure Angels at the perimeters. The fictive, painted cornice at the base of the apse is decorated with low reliefs on a gold ground that include small, winged angels’ heads. This imaginative detail underscores the illusion that the vision occurs outside and above the chapel in its own discrete region. The Miracle of St. Michael on Mount Gargano and the Miracle of St. Michael on Mont-Saint-Michel were each narrated by Jacobus de Voragine for St. Michael’s feasts (29 September and 16 November). Antoniazzo responded to the legends with characteristic insight. In 493, at a rocky site in Apulia near Siponto (which for a brief time had been Bessarion’s benefice), Michael requested a church in his name that was first built by angels; this became the main site of the saint’s Italian cult. A second miracle followed in 709, at a site known as “Monte Tumba” in Normandy (now Mont-Saint-Michel), where the saint manifested himself again to a bishop and proposed another church in his honor.44 Alongside his ubiquity in the West, not to mention his uniqueness as an angel who was equally a saint, Michael was the single, “most popular of the ‘personalized’ angels in the Byzantine world.” He possessed, as well, a broader, animistic identity in Jewish and Egyptian belief.45 For the learned Bessarion, he was an able emissary. The cardinal had labored on behalf of the Crusades, as well as for the union of Latin and Greek churches after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Under Pius II Piccolomini (1458–1464), he became Patriarch of that city. The angel of high places was, then, the perfect embodiment of a cosmopolitan,

The Nine Orders: Padua, Riofreddo, and Rome

militant, and politically resonant ideal of Christian union.46 In the frescoes, particularly in the depiction of the French miracle at the right, Antoniazzo stresses the community of the religious orders, specifically the Franciscans, who administered SS. Apostoli, as well as Bessarion’s confrères, the Basilian Fathers. He inserted, at the same time, the likenesses of several contemporaries: Louis XI, King of France, who takes on the role of the holy Bishop of Avranches, St. Aubert, and Francesco Maria della Rovere, General of the Franciscans (later Sixtus IV), with his nephew, Giuliano (later Julius II), all of whom look on in the foreground.47 In 1469, just at the moment of the chapel’s completion, the French king had founded the French Order of St. Michael, “Prince de la milice de Paradis.” The Order’s motto was “Sancte Michaël, defende nos in proelio.”48 Bessarion’s chapel also referred – if less conspicuously – to a third major miracle of St. Michael, and this time a local one that was the object of revived enthusiasm in Early Renaissance Rome. In 590, during an outbreak of the plague, Gregory the Great had led a procession through the Roman streets, carrying, so it was believed, the Salus Populi Romani, the precious Hodegetria icon of Santa Maria Maggiore that was attributed to the hand of St. Luke. As Voragine tells it, at the summit of Hadrian’s tomb (known henceforth as the Castel Sant’Angelo), Michael appeared to the crowd, drying and sheathing his blood-stained sword. The miracle reinforced the renowned efficacy of the icon as a miraculous agent, while Michael’s apparition as a mark of divine mercy affirmed, too, long-sought papal hegemony in the borgo.49 Bessarion’s panel by Antoniazzo was, in fact, a copy of the Marian basilica’s treasure and, like other contemporary copies, it preserved its model’s powers.50 There were, moreover, long-standing associations between the Italian cult of Michael and miraculous images from the East. It is clear that Bessarion was fully aware of the potency of these interwoven themes when he appropriated them not only for the purpose of Christian unity – which is the overriding message of his chapel – but also for the sake of the destiny of his own soul.51 On his tomb, he referred poignantly to his soul’s search for the stars from whence it had come. His celebration of St. Michael in light of the trajectory of his soul connects, too, with Michael’s special assignment as weigher of souls on the Day of Judgment, and as arbiter, then, of their blessed contents.

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Beyond these local considerations, there is also the larger question of the ways in which Michael’s miracle stories are different from those of other saints. As an angel, as a transcendent being, his representation in any form – linguistic or otherwise – is unstable; the existence of a representation must in a curious way simultaneously deny the possibility of resemblance.52 Many of the accounts of Michael’s miracles and visions allude to a kind of shattering light or to the fire-filled potential of his being, taking up his awe-inspiring scriptural (that is, textual) portrait quite directly.53 This kind of intellectual conundrum between the represented and the unrepresentable would not have been lost on Bessarion. It cannot be by accident that, in the end, the angel himself, as an angel, is absent from his own miracle narratives at SS. Apostoli. They emphasize instead the solid, tangible, and veristic character of the human protagonists and their settings.54 The clumsily painted bull that in the Monte Gargano miracle – and, in a different role, in the Norman one – turns the archer’s arrow back on himself seems less to indicate the Archangel than to underline by way of contrast the bull’s plodding corporeality. To indicate St. Michael’s form might have been to call into question his elemental and mysterious appearances as fire, thunder, and lightning, manifestations that began at Chonae, in the East, and from there made their way to the West.55 In this light, it is not just that the tripartite heavenly orders reflect and govern the earthly way of things, as Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, and as Bessarion’s program demonstrates, but that the angels, as ultimately unattainable beings, were quintessentially unlike the material emanations of the earthly world. In Byzantine art, the matter of style as a signifier of the quality of the angels and their function within multifigure compositions was a particularly long-lived and sensitive one.56 Michael participates in this history, for in the twelfth-century icon of his miracle at Chonae, from the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, his classicizing modeling explicitly delineates his tangible presence and his physical beauty, in contrast to the literally dematerialized hermit opposite him.57 On the other hand, in the era of Iconoclasm in the East, Michael’s image was subject to a different perspective, for then the image acted as a conduit to knowledge of the unknowable and supernal. In some ways, these polarities define the essence of Iconoclasm itself. Rather than resembling its model, the image encourages an active contemplation of the very tension between

The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin

itself and its subject. This tension fostered a “higher contemplation.”58 In the sixth century, Agathias addressed the image of Michael on the island of Plate, south of Constantinople. “The wax,” he said, greatly daring, has represented the invisible, the incorporeal chief of the angels in the semblance of his form. Yet it was no thankless [task] since the mortal who beholds the image directs his mind to a higher contemplation. His veneration is no longer distracted: engraving within himself the [archangel’s] traits, he trembles as if he were in the latter’s presence. The eyes encourage deep thoughts, and art is able by means of colours to ferry over [to its object] the prayer of the mind.59

Bessarion would have been more than sympathetic to these crosscultural and cerebral themes. In these same years, he engaged the likes of the Greek humanist, George of Trebizond – incidentally, the cardinal’s birthplace – in debates over Platonism versus Aristotelianism.60 In this way, his resurrected chapel offers a special instance of the coming together of a sophisticated philosophical and theological culture with a popular cult.

The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin The defining episodes of the Virgin’s life – the Annunciation, Nativity, Assumption, and Coronation – necessarily draw the company of the angels to her. Each of these cycles, in one way or another, place the Virgin at their center, whether literally, in the form of a devotional image, as in Padua and Rome, or by reason of her prominent part in an unfolding narrative structure, as at Riofreddo. Whether by way of Gabriel’s greeting, or of joyous announcement to the shepherds, whether as the means of her heavenly transport and musical welcome, the angels act as knowing agents of the divine and as divine theophany. The Assumption and Coronation, in particular, offered artists and patrons rare opportunities to represent the iconography of the Nine Orders that had otherwise become archaic by the later fifteenth century. Artists continued to make partial reference to it, however, by way of quotation, and long after the full schema fell into disuse. The red Seraphim and blue Cherubim, for example, continued to accompany the Virgin’s throne. In his carefully ordered Coronation of the Virgin (1438) (Fig. 18), Jacobello del Fiore ranked the red Seraphim in a compact body to the right of his

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18. Jacobello del Fiore, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (1438) (283 × 303 cm) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) (Photo credit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY)

composition, arranging the blue Cherubim to the left. Angelic musicians sit in niches at the lower level of the throne while additional angels frame the saints at the outer reaches of the architecture. Gathered at the Virgin’s right hand, the Cherubim, as Wisdom, affirm the Virgin’s status as Queen, as well as her role as the type for the Church, the key to the symbolism of the Coronation.61 In their own magisterial Coronation for San Pantalon, Venice (1444) (Plate XV), Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna create another architectonic masterpiece in their throne, behind which the nine ranks of angels are arrayed. Below them, at the center of the saintly assembly, and within the confines of the throne, a small crowd of putti toy with the instruments of the Passion. The artists combine here the Nine Orders with a larger community, one that includes the Evangelists and Doctors of the Church around the base of the throne, as well as the hierarchies of the blessed and angels above them, arranged as if they are spectators in a theater. Later, in his own lunette-shaped Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1475) (Plate XVI), Filippino Lippi painted simply the heads and wings of the Cherubim wreathed in an arch, beneath swoops of red cloth held aloft by full-bodied angels. At first glance, the circling drapery seems

The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin

deliberately suggestive of Seraphim, rendering Lippi’s naturalistic feat all the more adroit.62 In Francesco Botticini’s large altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1475–1477) (see Plate VI), which was probably destined for the humanist, Matteo Palmieri’s chapel in the Badia of Fiesole, a vast empyrean dwarfs a Tuscan landscape. Its concentric rings form a hovering ellipse that seems to be on the verge of projecting forward, above and over the viewer.63 In the panel’s original setting in a narrow chapel space, the rims of angels in three groups of three that frame the Virgin’s arrival would have reinforced an effect of concentrated light issuing from the physical oculus high in the chapel ceiling.64 In the landscape itself, which recedes backwards in the composition against the forward motion of the heavens, the view of Florence is consistent with the prospect that Palmieri himself might have seen from one of his properties near Fiesole. It seems clear that Botticini deliberately placed his patron before it, as a counterpoint to the agrarian vista behind Niccolosa Serragli, his wife, who may in fact have been the true patron of the work. She is dressed in black, as a widow or as a nun, possibly affiliated, then, to the same Benedictine order that resided at San Pier Maggiore. The farms behind her resemble properties on the slopes of the Val d’Elsa which she would have brought with her into the marriage.65 Yet the painting had still more pointed personal relevance for Palmieri, who died in 1475 before the work was finished. The painting ideates aspects of his controversial visionary poem, the Città di Vita, which was inspired by Dante and which he began in 1455 and completed in 1464. Rather than a Virgil or a Beatrice, however, it is the Cumaean Sibyl who is Palmieri’s companion through the heavens; also, unlike Dante, Palmieri broached in his work several singularly unorthodox theological views.66 Among them, centrally, was his rephrasing of Origen’s idea that human souls originated among the angels; specifically, among those of the heavenly hierarchy who, during the rebel angel’s fall, exercised their will and adopted a neutral stance, taking side neither with Lucifer nor with God.67 Palmieri was more lenient than Dante on the fate of the neutral angels, for he allows, in his Book One, in treating the creation of human souls, that God’s mercy gives these angels a second chance as human persons: “Ad la seconda prova vuol sia posta / lor libertà.”68 Following the Apocalypse of

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St. John, Palmieri maintained that a third of heaven fell with the rebel angels, but that, following Augustine, the number of those who fell was equal to the number of souls who will be – or who are – saved. One-third of the angels, led by Michael, would stay loyal to God; one-third followed Lucifer into misery; and the remaining angels, equal in number to redeemed or redeemable souls, were cast out to wait in Elysium, beyond the highest sphere, before their year-long descent to earth by way of the planets.69 In Book Two, Palmieri and the Sibyl are led by a bad angel, Calogenius, down the left-hand path to hell, observing as they descend the soul’s temptations within mansions of vice. Then Palmieri ascends a radiant stairway to the mansion of the blessed, whereupon, in Book Three, along the right-hand path, he visits heavenly mansions, including here (unlike Dante) the dwelling place of Plato.70 Palmieri followed Origen, determining that God sent the neutral or disobedient angels, as part of their own redemption, to human persons. There, they act in concert with the human will, choosing good or evil. After death, the blessed, as redeemed souls, are returned to their angelic state and to a condition of eternal beatitude. Therein, as with Origen, lay the seditious idea of the intimate mingling of human, soul, and angelic substance, and therein lay Palmieri’s heterodoxy. By the later fifteenth century, as we have seen, it was an article of faith that angels are beings who must be signally other than human persons, by their divine nature and in their very essence. That the angels, like humankind, stars, and demons, possessed an autonomous will, and that the soul preexisted before joining the body, as Origen taught, had far-reaching implications for orthodox Christianity. Origen’s teachings on the will would not be contested, but the fifth-century Church would condemn as heretical his teachings on the soul. These precepts were condemned again in Palmieri’s day, at the Council of Florence in 1439, signaling at once, of course, their enduring vitality as well as their controversy.71 His poem was never published, and the vicissitudes of the manuscript, which seems, nonetheless, to have been consulted by Florentine intellectuals, constitute a small mystery in their own right.72 This tale of equivocal responses to Palmieri’s works, however, parallels that of Origen’s own critical renown. None other than Jerome, the humanist hero of Renaissance men of letters, had reason to praise Origen to whom he was indebted, and this was so even though he was drawn to attack Origen

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violently from 495 on in his skirmish with Origen’s translator, Rufinus.73 Hailed as an exegete by Jerome, the Church Father and philologist par excellence, and yet equally excoriated in history as a heretic, Origen’s biography assimilates to that of Palmieri. This affinity between them, founded on the assumption that the engaged, literary life of the humanist-theologian ideally models that of antique exemplars, explains many of the contradictions in Palmieri’s story. The Dominican, Leonardo Dati, wrote a commentary on the text of the poem, and, as if to mollify potential critics, he noted that it was the Sibyl’s voice that the reader heard rather than that of his friend, Palmieri. Dati was also sanguine about the troubling fact of the neutral angels’ free will, which, he thought, betrayed their human connection. He inclined, as well – although this, in itself, is not so surprising – to a more inclusive and orthodox reading of the character of the soul, one that depended in very large part on Augustine.74 For both Florentine writers, Palmieri and Dati, the Virgin, too, in her sovereign role in the Incarnation and as intercessor for humankind, assumed an even more exceptional place than she was accustomed to in a redemptive Christian scheme. In the last canto of Palmieri’s poem, she is received into heaven as its Queen. There, too, in the sixth and eighth lower circles, and as in Botticini’s lower rings, the saints and angels conspicuously cohabit; the Seraphim, by contrast, dwell in the seventh and ninth tiers.75 Botticini endows each saint and angel with a halo of rays and a star at the breast, subtly suggesting, perhaps, the shared aspect of the soul and its angelic origin.76 The panel has a checkered reception history. Vasari recorded that both the patron and the artist, whom he thought was Botticelli, were condemned, while seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chronicles registered that the chapel had been placed at one point under interdict, and that a curtain had long concealed the altarpiece – evidence that, in itself, could also be unrelated to Palmieri’s reputation. It is probable that Palmieri’s posthumous profile, or rumors about him, particularly about the Città di Vita, have clouded the painting’s own critical fortunes.77 Dati’s ambitions to write a justification for the poem in his commentary of 1466 indicate perhaps that he anticipated controversy, and the uncertain fate of Palmieri’s codex also bears this out. In his eulogy at the funeral in San Pier Maggiore, Alamanno Rinuccini referred to negative perceptions of the text. He argued, nonetheless, that the poem was educative and that it

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could be justified, as well, by way of Horace, because of the special value of artistic freedom.78 In fact, Cristoforo Landino, the noted poet, classical scholar, and teacher, went so far as to laud the work (which, after all, has survived in several manuscripts), distinguishing it from the perceived “heresy” of its creator.79 In 1484, Luigi Pulci, in his Morgante, took up again precisely the controversial Origenian themes of Palmieri’s opus, namely, the neutral angels and notions of metempsychosis, and he referred to his predecessor in affectionate terms.80 This hints, perhaps, at an ongoing, if discrete conversation among learned circles about Palmieri’s sensational creation, focusing still on the angels, the preexistence of the soul, and human will. These conversations extended well into the sixteenth century and beyond, and they led, too, to imaginative pictures of Palmieri himself in the afterlife, damned, “fuggente col volto nascosto e reverso a terra.”81 In the mid-Cinquecento, the adjacency of angels and human souls, and the almost occult character of the work, still obsessed writers, such as Giovan Battista Gelli, in whose dialogue the issues, and Palmieri’s fate, are pondered yet again: O tu mi fai ricordare hora qui del vicin nostro che diceva ancor egli che l’anime nostre eran quegli Angioli che non si determinarono al peccare né a servire a Dio ma restarono infra due; e queste eran di poi mandare in noi a determinarsise elle volevano seguire il bene o il male, e questa opinione non si seppe giammai che e’ la tenesse in vita ma fu ritrovata dopo la morte sua ne’ suoi libri; per il che furono dissotterrate l’ossa sue e sepolte fuor sagrato. – Et chi fu questo – O tu non te ne ricordi tu? Matteo Palmieri . . .82

By this time, Gelli’s speakers, as well as their contemporaries, have the burden of hindsight. They tar Palmieri – an otherwise prudent, pious, and civic-minded man – with the same brush that was, in fact, applied to Pico at the end of the Quattrocento. Palmieri had prefigured Pico in his weighing of Origenist constructs; Pico’s much more ambitiously conceived views, intended for public debate, in fact, led to censure, banishment, and flight.83 As for Botticini’s accomplishment, the presence of a curtain, whether this was a later addition or not, may actually constitute a mark of the image’s prestige, and it may also point to the altarpiece’s liturgical function wherein it was revealed on certain feast days. As a fictive element, curtains have also long marked the boundaries of visions which they might veil or

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unveil; this curtain, then, might equally have made Palmieri’s problematic heaven available by choice. The hallucinogenic precision of the angelic choirs – it is not by chance that Vasari linked the altarpiece to Botticelli – and the degree to which they dominate the Tuscan terrain connect the artist’s style to paintings in miniature, and also perhaps, in this way, to the humanist himself, whose identity was inextricably bound to the world of books.84 Palmieri’s Città di Vita comprised, after all, homage large and small to Augustine and Dante. In portraying the angelic hierarchies above the author and his wife, Botticini asserted not only his patron’s devout expectation of the afterlife, for he also offered testimony to the authenticity of Palmieri’s vision while he was alive, testimony to that afterlife’s universal and eternal existence. In his commentary on the work, Dati noted, in fact, that Palmieri had decided to write the poem as a result of two visions that came to him, beginning in 1451 while he was in Pescia. In these, the shade, or ghost, of Cipriano Rucellai appeared.85 Rucellai revealed to Palmieri the secrets of the great beyond, and how it was that the angels affected the destiny of human souls in view of their choice (“volontà che non si fé vedere”) to side with God or Lucifer, a choice that forced the undecided to come to earth as souls to take a second test (“seconda prova”). In 1455, Rucellai appeared again, while Matteo was in Naples as ambassador at King Alfonso’s court, and scolded him for having done nothing to disseminate his earlier revelations. Sent, he said, by God’s angels, Rucellai exhorted him to write a poem after Dante, in terzine.86 It is hard not to see in this story a telling reverberation of Jerome’s visit to his younger correspondent, Augustine, from the reaches of heaven. Jerome’s bodiless manifestation was also a visionary encounter that included a rebuke from one who knew about the character of the afterlife.87 It is a curious fact that Palmieri requested that his poem be made public only after his death, perhaps not only because of its sensitive doctrinal propositions, but also in order to suggest an audacious reconciliation of his unusual eschatological vision with the destiny of his own soul. In that vision, although not in its Origenian inflection, Augustine and Dante had preceded him; Palmieri, too, as the viewer infers, might now count himself among their company. That Palmieri was highly motivated as an historian, as well as a civic humanist and theologian, and that he was conscious,

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therefore, of his obligation to the past, is evident in his most popular work, his Vita Civile, which he wrote in c. 1430–1440 and which was published in 1500.88 Furthermore, in 1454, following his first vision but before he had formally composed his poem, he had noted with interest the plays, or “rapresentagioni,” staged in Florence on the city’s feast day of St. John the Baptist. As a member of the committee charged with supervising the festivities, Palmieri had reason to make special note of l’edificio di San Michele Agnolo, al quale sporastava Iddio padre in una nugola, e in piaza al dirimpetto a Signori feceno rapresentagione della battaglia angelica, quando Lucifero fu co’ sua agnoli maladetti cacciato di cielo.89

It was the manuscript of his Città di Vita which was laid on his chest during his public exequies.90 Beneath a shimmering firmament, Botticini’s Assumption transpires in the lower third of the panel. Here, the Apostles, who are congregated around the lily-filled tomb, seem largely unaware of the canopy above them, save for two or three who perhaps include St. John. That the Nine Orders appear in a painting of this date is, in itself, a deliberate archaism, but in the positive sense of invention and historical self-consciousness. In their gesturing and affable discourse with the saints, particularly at the lowest reaches of their celestial bleachers, the angels reference Palmieri’s own poetic imagination as well as his theological daring. If will, and thus choice, connect humankind and the angels, then it makes sense that these two share their dwelling places in heaven, as self-determining and changeable beings who have the capacity to ascend or descend, according to their own lights. Botticini ably met his own challenge in uniting a careful diagram of the heavens with its physical context in the chapel, including with it not only a receding, local panorama, but also two dramatic Marian subjects and two donor portraits. On their cloudy banks, Botticini’s angels and saints look at one another or up to Christ’s solemn blessing of Mary, participating in the mysteries of the Assumption and Coronation. The artist equally suggests the doctrine of the communion of saints [communio sanctorum], which, together with the existence of angels, is now part of the Apostles’ Creed. Vasari himself, as if to underline the inclusiveness and precision of Palmieri’s altarpiece,

The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision

itemized the callings of the figures in their heavenly “zones,” listing Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, Martyrs, Confessors, Doctors, Virgins, and the angelic orders themselves.91 The doctrine of the communion of saints seems very much to the point with regard to Augustine’s heaven, not perhaps so much the heaven that he had glanced at Ostia as his attention to the community of the blessed that followed later, with his promotion to bishop of Hippo. This doctrine derived, in part, from letters of Pseudo-Augustine; and it also depends on Augustine’s City of God and the bond of charity [Unitas caritatis], which enfolds not only the saints and angels in heaven, but also the just and sinners on earth.92 Matteo Palmieri and Leonardo Dati knew their Augustine, but no artist seems to have imagined the beauties and joys of paradise more sensitively than their Dominican confrère, Fra Angelico.

The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment in San Marco of c. 1431 (Plate XVII) embodies the idea of the union of vision with beatitude and the notion of joining love with praise advanced by the Church Fathers. He does this by means of metaphors such as the embrace, the kiss, the circling dance, and the blissful conviviality of mortals and angels.93 Gardens and gates stand in for the City of God; it is thanks to Augustine, in fact, that the city became the standard metaphor in the West.94 Fra Angelico’s figurative language of heaven is expressed in thumbnail motifs of earthly delight. With the magician-like gifts of the artist, he has made Augustine’s heaven, that heaven experienced in human terms, a fully imaginable place. At the same time, whether the setting is an exotic garden or an aerial stage receding steeply toward the horizon, the artist makes clear that these places are remote from the mundane, that they are symbolic, even as sympathetic human behaviors take place in them. Art becomes, then, particularly in this Dominican’s deceptively simple articulation, the metaphor of metaphors, a re-presentation of the active, mutual relationship between the divine and his creatures which the Church Fathers had long defined in terms of active analogies such as seeing, loving, and praising. Perhaps of related importance here, in view of the Dominican Order’s emphasis on the homiletic power of the image, is Augustine’s somewhat confounding definition – at least, for the modern reader – of “literal” as meaning what God intended Genesis to

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mean. These analogies of seeing, loving, and praising lend themselves to the mastery of the artist, and, in this instance, to Fra Angelico’s training as a miniaturist, his use of gold and the jewel-like intensity of his colors, his ability to work within the challenging confines of an unusually shaped frame, and his delicate economy of emotion. As a member of an order that followed Augustine’s Rule, he was immersed in a theological culture at San Marco that privileged the Church Father’s writings.95 We know that Augustine drew on Plato for his heaven – or, more precisely, on Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 C.E.) – as well as on Paul; thus, he turned to intellect and affect respectively. In heaven, he thought, we will have both understanding (intellegere; videre) and enjoyment (frui; gaudere) (De Trinitate 8, 3–10). Once liberated from sin, we will be able to choose freely to accept the love of God, for “heaven is a free, and unshakeable, embrace” (City of God 21, 15).96 Timeless and at the end of time, heaven is “now and eschatological.” The souls of the blessed will be restless in their state of accumulating love (amor) and desire (desiderium), and they will be eager for reunion with their bodies. Above all, Augustine’s heaven derives from Scripture and the patristic tradition founded on it in which the immortality of the soul recedes in importance in relation to the resurrection of the body; soul and body meet in heaven. Augustine follows Paul, differentiating between the flesh in its doomed worldliness (caro) and the body (corpus) made by God and transformed into a heavenly entity that is different, different in that it is now incorruptible, a perfect version of itself.97 Salvation is arrived at through the communion of saints (ecclesia perfecta), the City of God, and the body of Christ. Heaven, then, for Augustine, is the destination of those who choose God. By the same token, however, many are not chosen, for they choose to reject grace (City of God 13, 8; Enchiridion 98–105) so that the body’s death “is a good to the good but an evil to the evil” (City of God 13, 8). Those who manage to get to heaven are equal and “fulfilled according to their corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual potential.”98 Those with greater potential shine more brightly, or sit higher or closer. Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1430) for San Domenico, Fiesole (Fig. 19), provides a glimpse into this special kind of fellowship, and into these defining terms for the communion of saints. Augustine himself is seated at the left, in green, Mary Magdalene is prominently placed in the center, and

The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision

19. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (for San Domenico, Fiesole) (panel) (c. 1431) (209 × 206 cm) (Louvre) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

other saints with angels flank the throne. Moreover, while the members of the court of heaven gathered here may earn their place by reason of their filiation with the newly established fifteenth-century Observant reform, it should not be overlooked that it is not only the prophets and saints who affirm earthly ideals of hierarchy, but also the angels themselves, fulfilling their long-standing role, going back to Pseudo-Dionysius, of ecclesiastical electioneering.99 Augustine uses a kind of metaphorical language that would have been second nature to a learned Dominican and stimulating to a Renaissance artist. The concept of the beatific vision on which Augustine’s heaven is formulated (a term that is applied later to his theological proposition) presupposes the sensory encounter – seeing – as the paradigmatic

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20. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (fresco) (c. 1440–1441) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

metaphor of communion. In the same way, Augustine’s metaphors of light, which are never simple metaphors, as well as his references to spatial properties such as height and proximity, devolve to visual experience. Fra Angelico had an acute sensibility relativc to these themes. In works such as his Coronation of the Virgin in a cell at San Marco (c. 1440–1441) (Fig. 20), for example, his saints are present at a celestial vision that oscillates between inner presence, the Coronation as object of inward contemplation, and real presence, a vision granted both to the painted protagonists and to the inhabitant of the cell during his journey of prayer. For Augustine, the saints possessed an exceptional power of sight that was “full and clear.”100 Unlike sinners, who deflect light, or ordinary mortals who accept the light in refracted form, the saints admit its

The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision

entrance freely and, by analogy, with the reception of God’s grace.101 In general, as we know, he privileges sight – a theme that must have been noteworthy for his Renaissance readers. If the fetus in the womb could be permanently molded by the image of the object entering through its mother’s eyes (a notion also widespread in the Renaissance), so, in the same way, is the soul impressed by exterior forms (De Trinitate 11, 1, 5). The gaze of the saint toward God effects and confirms his or her inner purity, reflecting it back and forth like a mirror. In heaven, we continue to dress our thoughts in sensory images;102 only at the moment of the beatific vision will “our constantly turning cogitations [will] perhaps not be going and returning from one thing to another, but we shall have all our knowledge at one glance” (De Trinitate 15, 16, 26). Augustine concluded later in his life that, at the Resurrection, the sight of God, which is the special province of the saints, would “‘possibly and indeed most probably’ be with the eyes of the body. With an ‘extraordinary power of sight,’ Augustine says, the blessed will be able ‘to see the immaterial.’”103 San Bernardino was only one among many populists who, in a sermon for the octave of the Resurrection, affirmed the doctrine that the first gift for the blessed on their arrival in heaven is a direct vision of the three natures of God; this is their entitlement by reason of their faith.104 In Augustine’s later heaven, existence consisted no longer in the ecstasies of individual souls. Heaven now possessed a social dimension in which the community of saints, including the angels, could see and communicate with one another.105 Aquinas still more explicitly taught that the angels, although not redeemed, belonged in this communion by dint of their subservience to Christ and his gift to them of his grace, his gratia capitis.106 This is Fra Angelico’s paradise, the paradise of his San Marco Last Judgment. Released from their tombs and first rejoicing at the beatific vision that they see above them, the blessed then gather in shared and prayerful wonder; among them are popes, friars, Dominicans, cardinals, monarchs, bishops, and female and male saints. The angels, beginning with the one most prominent in the foreground who closely hugs a tonsured friar, lead the blessed on their way toward the gates, moving either toward or past the stately dance in which nine angels mingle with mortals. As if to express its very opposite, this sociability is contrasted at the right with the solitary horror of each damned soul who, falling and staggering, is herded by demons toward a cave that leads to the rocky compartments of hell.

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In the upper reaches of the composition, ranged at either side of God the Father, are the senior saints, including Dominic and Francis, who are seated at the far ends of rows that lead to Peter and Paul, and the Virgin and St. John, who are at the edges of an angelic host. Christ’s inner blue mandorla is framed by the red Seraphim against gold and a gold-infused blue, while the other angelic orders, including the Principalities with their swords, are intermingled, ranked in twos at the upper reaches of the sphere and thinning to a single file toward the bottom where an angel holds a cross and two blow the trumpets of Judgment Day. The artist adapted a rectangular format in his later Last Judgment in Berlin (c. 1450) to the vertical frames of a triptych, but he maintained the illusion of a continuous landscape (Fig. 21). Here, the Seraphim in gold gleam against the blue Cherubim, and the lower angels frame the orderly crowd at either side of God the Father. Although they are less clearly identified as to their orders, two among their angelic number hover above the melée as if to reassure their charges, and to separate them from their sinful brothers and sisters.

21. Fra Angelico, Last Judgment (panel) (c. 1450) (103 × 65 cm: central panel) (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) (Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY)

The Communion of the Blessed and the Beatific Vision

22. Raphael, Disputà (Theology) (fresco) (c. 1510), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

In his Disputà (or Theology) (Fig. 22), Raphael came to demonstrate just how much he admired Fra Angelico in his instructive diagram of the doctrine of the communion of saints. The artist depends on a many layered reading of “communion,” just as Fra Angelico had done before him, and he also seems to show an understanding of the terms of the doctrine itself.107 The theologians, saints, and prophets in their aerial apse are concentrated in their conference on the meaning of the Eucharist, a conference that is governed by the Trinity, and symmetrically arranged around the monstrance containing the ultimate symbol of symbols for Christ’s body and the Church. It is no accident, as we have noted, that Augustine, with Aquinas at his shoulder and Bonaventure to the right, is the only figure actively writing. The fresco was conceived and executed when the Augustinian Prior General, Egidio da Viterbo, frequented the papal court as an advisor to Raphael’s patron, and possibly also to Raphael himself. Both Raphael and Michelangelo seem to have rendered in their own conceptions of heaven compositions that are sympathetic not only to Fra Angelico’s images of last things and paradise, but also to the tenor of

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Augustine’s later writings. In Paul’s heavenly vision, described in an apocryphal text of c. 388, yet not one that Augustine seriously subscribed to, Paul met the Virgin, the Old Testament patriarchs, and some prophets. In Cyprian’s (d. c. 258) On Mortality, however, Augustine found more sympathetic material, for there he read that: “A dense and abundant crowd [of parents, brothers, and sons] are longing for us.”108 Denseness and abundance are very much what we see in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–1541) (Fig. 23), a vast composition that readily associates itself

23. Michelangelo, Last Judgment (fresco) (1536–1541), Sistine Chapel, Vatican (Photo credit: The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

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with mid-sixteenth-century reform debate about Christ as the “mediatorial centerpiece of predestination.”109 Beneath him, one of the angels, holding the large Book of Life, makes it clear that it is earthly actions – choice – not Christ in judgment, that determine the true fate of the soul. Michelangelo’s biographer, Condivi, saw what was meant here, as he also appreciated the joy and torment of the artist’s figures: “everyone reads and recognizes his past life, having almost to judge himself.”110

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CHAPTER TH REE

BODIES AND VOICES: ANNUNCIATION AND HEAVENLY HARMONIES

Whenever they unfurl their wings in flight and then gather them gracefully together again, they make their ministry a sweet song. Since they are spirits endowed with the power of the Most High, they make a song that no other creature is able to sing.1

Ave Maria In the moment of the Annunciation, the material and the immaterial meet in the encounter between a mortal and a supernatural intelligence. The salutation “Ave Maria” of Archangel Gabriel invited medieval scholastics, preachers, and their audiences to reflect on this event as a marvel, not only as the typological sequel to Eve’s fall, but also as an articulation of the problem of human sin and of the redemptive powers of grace. The angels themselves, in their own fall from grace, also shared the human disposition to sin; unlike human persons, however, as orthodox teachings maintain, fallen angels cannot repent.2 How is it, as the Virgin had inquired, as much to herself as to the holy messenger before her, that I can be worthy of such divine directives? The form of their communication – the greeting of the Archangel and the mortal’s acquiescent response – also engaged medieval and Renaissance theories of language that bear on theological propositions about how the Word could be made flesh and also, more profoundly, on the nature of all words themselves as speech acts and signs. It is, after all, a paradox of the angel’s nature – and Gabriel’s here – that his character as spirit, his

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simultaneous participation in divine foreknowledge and human affairs, render him a register for definitions of what it is to be human – what it is to see, to speak, to hear, to smell, and to read. The Annunciation is the instance at which divine potency meets frail human potential, and it is the instance at which they are both transformed. At the same time, when rendering this improbable scene in paint or sculpture, artists fashioned an event that was already part and parcel of the fabric of lived experience. In repeating “Ave Maria,” the words of Gabriel, according to Caesarius of Heisterbach, a person might ward off demons through the powers of the Virgin. By the twelfth century, the Ave Maria was commonplace and, from the fourteenth century onward, on Bonaventure’s recommendation, the prayer was accompanied each day by the sounding of the Angelus bell.3 In invoking Gabriel’s words, in fact, the speaker briefly inhabits the angel’s role. Owners of medieval Books of Hours participated quite directly in the narrative not only by reading aloud but also, occasionally, by seeing themselves, the patrons, depicted there.4 Mary, Queen of Heaven, received invocations that included all of her angelic companions and, as much medieval and Renaissance imagery also attests, angels often accompany her in visions and dreams of celestial climes.5 In Renaissance Florence, the new year began on 25 March, the feast day of the Annunciation. The Annunciation itself provides a kind of summa of angelic lore with respect to the Virgin. At the very end of the Divine Comedy, in Canto 31, St. Bernard takes Beatrice’s place, urging the Pilgrim to turn his focus toward the Virgin. In the last illumination of his Paradiso, Giovanni di Paolo portrays Dante endearingly plucking at Bernard’s sleeve as he asks the name of the angel occupying the summit of the rose. The saint explains that this is Gabriel, in conformity with his own real-life, written reflection that the angelic greeting constituted a letter written by the finger of God. In this elevated place, the Archangel signals, as much for Dante as for his readers, the importance of the angels for the Virgin and her devotees. Dante’s Gabriel is touchingly dedicated to his queen, just as he is a starring actor in the salvation story in his own right.6 Toward the end of Paradiso, perched in the celestial rose and full of love of Mary, he makes a “game” of looking at her directly, deep into her eyes. In admiring the Virgin and her angelic consort, Bonaventure admitted that there could be an incipient danger of confusing dulia (veneration) with latria (worship) but, as he also made clear, worship was truly owed to God

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alone “as a tribute of utter dependency.”7 Yet angels’ actions – their “office,” as Augustine would have pointed out – reveal good knowledge to human persons, knowledge derived from the immaculate source of God himself. They are also capable of supernatural healing, particularly if they are from the specific orders of Archangels, Virtues, or the demon-fighting Powers.8 Likewise, just as the evil daemones of late antiquity share qualities with the demons in Scripture, so, too, the angels, who are the demons’ counterparts as intermediary spirits, help define the difference between evil and good magic, and in material form, in amulets and charms.9 Perhaps, too, while the problem of the corporeality of saints meant that they might appear less in visions, angels had no such problem and freely populated visions and dreams. Although they frequently accompanied and exhibited saints’ relics and reliquaries, the sacredness of earthly sites connected to the angels was not necessarily bound to any material remains or evidence visible to the physical senses. Michael is an exception, since he had left behind both objects, such as a red cloth at Monte Gargano, and a footprint.10 Gabriel’s audience with the Virgin was not a vision, although its reenactment in diverse artistic media surely resonated with apprehensions and depictions of visions. Angels could manifest themselves to anyone, and outside clerical supervision or witness; this lent them, further, a subversive, even transgressive aspect. Angelic visions seem to have occurred more often to medieval women than to men such that these encounters lent women an authority – even urging authority upon them when they did not want it – and an authority that they otherwise might not ordinarily possess.11 Perhaps this, too, is a reflection of the prestige conferred on womankind by the Annunciation itself, a visionary intervention that was, in fact, very real and that had an indelible outcome. But any meeting with an angel, in any form, should properly be understood in strict ways, according to many medieval writers. To propose that a dream of an angel was anything but a directive from God, as Boethius of Dacia ventured in the thirteenth century, was to risk official censure.12 Saints and angels shared felicity in heaven, but those saints who, on earth, had been fortunate to witness angels tended to do so according to scriptural precedents, as in the lives of the patriarchs and the Apocalypse of St. John. Often, however, the altered state of the angel meant that his human interlocutor might realize only afterward that he or she had witnessed an angel; this was true in the Book of Tobit, for example, in which Raphael

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first appears to Tobias as a man. Balaam (Numbers 22: 21–35) did not see the angel who was in his way. Angels in medieval accounts could also appear as monks, bishops, sailors, young women, and even the Holy Spirit itself. They could simply occur as a beautiful scent.13 In the Annunciation, however, the angel, Gabriel, was a materialization of the divine Word, fulfilling his high mission as the incarnation of God’s speech.14 efh

In 1503, Isabella d’Este watched a theatrical performance in Ferrara of the Annunciation that accompanied the nuptials of Duke Alfonso and Lucrezia Borgia.15 The marchesina’s account in a letter of what she saw brings to mind paintings of the event, perhaps one such as Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation (Fig. 24) of some forty years earlier in Arezzo. “And there was Mary,” she wrote, “under a capital supported by an octagonal column reciting prophecy when the sky opened up, where God the Father, surrounded by angels [attached to iron frames from above], spoke to the angel Gabriel, who was at the very center [. . .] [The angel] said the words to Mary (’facta la narration’).”16 Isabella then duly noted the fictive clouds and unseen iron parts that enabled the airborne movement of the actors. Isabella’s letter suggests the mutual dynamics between the performance of the sacra rappresentazione and painting. She describes, moreover, a devotional drama that she knew to be a simulation; still, for all her awareness of the machinery, it was marvelous to her nonetheless. Gabriel’s salutation is a touchstone for ways of thinking about angelic representation and communication, first, with respect to late medieval controversies about the nature of meaning in words and, second, with respect to the idea of visual manifestation, of seeing itself as reading of a kind, and as described in discrete late medieval theories of angelic communication. Angels, then, and Gabriel’s appearance, in particular, are a form of explanation. They embody a “way of being-in-the world.”17 The Annunciation offers a case study as the moment for Christian persons in which divine Word is made flesh; the Incarnation; the Logos embodied through ineffable means. This point is concisely made by Fra Angelico in his illumination within the letter “R” from a San Marco Missal, in which Gabriel is interrupting Mary, as he tends to do in pictorial renderings, in her reading (Fig. 25). As Luke (1: 26–38) in his Gospel recounts this moment, Gabriel:

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24. Piero della Francesca, Annunciation (fresco) (1452–1466), San Francesco, Arezzo (Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/ Art Resource, NY)

was sent from God [. . .] to Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph [. . .] and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus [. . .] The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.18

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25. Fra Angelico, Annunciation, Detail of letter “R” (Missal 558, fol. 33v) (after 1417) (Museo di San Marco, Florence) (Photo credit: Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, NY)

If “a painter is a professional visualizer of holy stories,” as Michael Baxandall observed in his classic account of fifteenth-century visual culture, he is at the same time articulating the life experience and expectations of his viewer.19 In one of his most well-known passages, Baxandall analyzes a sermon on the Annunciation by the popular preacher and friar, Roberto da Caracciolo, and he lists Roberto’s three categories of mystery: “(1) the Angelic Mission, (2) the Angelic Salutation and (3) the Angelic Colloquy.” He lists for each, too, the preacher’s five subheadings such that, in the Angelic Colloquy, the preacher itemizes “the five

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successive spiritual and mental conditions or states attributable to Mary,” what Roberto calls the Virgin’s “Five Laudable Conditions.”20 The fifteenth-century preacher and his listeners were distinctly sensitive to the Virgin’s state in this “crisis,” measuring in the choreography of her physical response one or other – or a mixture – of five calibrated states of mind that they spontaneously translated. In Botticelli’s late, Cestello Annunciation (Plate XVIII), they might have understood Mary’s “Disquiet” (Conturbatio); they ascertained “Reflection” (Cogitatio) in Fra Carnevale’s Annunciation; and “Inquiry” (Interrogatio) in Baldovinetti’s stately, somewhat skeptical Virgin (Fig. 26). Fra Angelico seems generally to have favored the type of “Submission” (Humiliatio), while, finally, other

26. Alessio Baldovinetti, Annunciation (panel) (1447) (187 × 137 cm) (Uffizi) (Photo: Nicola Lorusso) (Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

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artists expressed a notion of the Virgin’s “Merit” (Meritatio), as, following Gabriel’s departure, the Virgin’s soul rose in concert with her feeling the Child within her – the type, then, of the solitary Annunciate Virgin, such as Antonello da Messina’s Virgin of the Annunciation.21 To the beholders of these paintings, however, who might stray in their minds from the textual prescriptions of the Marian sermon to reflect on works of art, Gabriel also seems to have his own meaningful choreography. In the Cestello work, for example, as a stunning, brown-haired youth, he is intent on his task of greeting the Virgin even as his ardent, genuflecting form communicates empathy with her, an empathy encapsulated in the dancing dialogue of their hands, almost at the center of the composition, shaping in eloquent mirroring their ontological divide. In Baldovinetti’s Uffizi Annunciation, on the other hand, Gabriel rather blithely rushes in, with a purposeful optimism and a kind of star-struck naïvety, arms crossed and smiling. Baxandall’s resonant concept of the “period eye,” wherein social acts and cultural practices – in this instance, sermons – shape a culture’s attention to visual forms, was accompanied by his proposition that humanist language shaped at the same moment as it expressed aesthetic criteria. Yet it remained for him a lifelong question as to the very inadequacy of words to register visual experience.22 In this light, the semiotic argument that the word/sign is an arbitrary signifier extricates us from Baxandall’s dilemma. In the compelling view of Georges DidiHuberman, art historians have been too much taken up with “readability” and mimesis: “the tyranny,” as he put it, “of the visible and the lisible.” For Didi-Huberman, who might be described as a kind of latter-day scholastic, these misdirections can be corrected, at least in Fra Angelico, by the notions of “dissemblance” and “figuration,” derived from medieval theological concepts of dissimilitudo and figura: “dissemblance” as “a celebration of the non-resemblance between phenomenal and divine things, and figura [or figuration], as a mode of establishing meaningful relations among different things and events” – that is, how to reconcile, as would a medieval exegete, the mystery hidden and potentially ruptured by a visual resemblance.23 Angels are both dissemblance and figuration: dissemblance in that any image of one denies him his essence as incorporeal, invisible, swift spirit; figuration in that, once embodied, the angel is pinned like a butterfly to

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meaning, to definition, to a narrative, to an event. Later medieval theologians, perhaps even Aquinas himself, may in fact have had in mind artistic renderings of angels when they drew up their classificatory angelic systems. Angels, as we have seen, were a kind of obsession for the scholastics whose legacy through the Early Modern era is pervasive. Their theories of angelic communication allow us to think about an inclusive, image-based definition of reading, and they remind us of the sensibilities of the medieval and Renaissance beholder. In Aquinas’s view, as we have seen, if an angel’s will directed him to communicate with a fellow angel, then only his interlocutor would hear him. An angel’s understanding of meaning entailed a spontaneous and complete grasp of his object as a kind of perfected visual transaction. For Aquinas, the human mind was inferior in its need of words and sentences, a view that inspired his interpreters to revisit the whole question of the act of reading. For some of these interpreters, angelic locutio was equivalent to manifesting a spiritual ray that would be directed at the addressee. Dante himself dwelt on the proposition of the likeness of light to language when he recommended “an illuminated vernacular,” rather than Latin. This vernacular language radiated light at the same time as it reflected it.24 Golden rays as gilt lines from God to the Virgin, often delivering to her the dove of the Holy Spirit, are part and parcel of Annunciation iconography. Filippino Lippi’s tondi from the 1480s (Figs. 27–28) comprise only one example of this continuous and popular tradition, and it is possibly worth noting that the rays emitting from Gabriel’s panel diminish as they near the Virgin.25 Already, in 1333, Simone Martini had elegantly depicted Gabriel’s first words among both the foliage of his olive branch and the lilies set between the figures, the letters raised in gesso, incarnated, as it were, above the gilded background (Plate XIX).26 The body of his message follows along the edges of his cloak, while he himself, as a figure in gold on gold, fulfils his nature as light and fire.27 The dove of the Holy Spirit is encircled by his winged brethren, the Seraphim, while Gabriel’s own wings, above his floating plaid mantle, are delicately traced, with peacock feathers at their edges. The choice of peacock feathers for angels’ wings, which other artists also made, reiterates beliefs about the undying nature of the peacock himself, ideas that are sympathetic to the angel, for the ancients believed that the bird’s flesh did not corrupt after death. For Origen and, later, for Augustine,

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27. Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Angel (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

and in Christian symbolism more broadly, the peacock signifies the Resurrection; his feathers sometimes ornament church interiors at Easter. As Juno’s bird, further, the peacock’s feathers also connoted her kingdom, the high spheres beyond earth, in their patterns of gilt circles on a blue ground. The “eyes” of the peacock’s feathers associated them with the all-seeing capacities of angels.28 In Simone’s painting, Gabriel also wears a lotus-patterned garment that deliberately recalls the valuable fabrics, imported from the East, of dalmatics worn by bishops and deacons in contemporary Siena.29 Before Simone, too, inscriptions bearing the words exchanged at this event were not uncommon.30 Fra Angelico is perhaps the most sophisticated interpreter of these themes. As a spiritual descendent and confrère of Aquinas, he seems characteristically to have meditated on every gesture of his brush. When he portrayed the conversation between Gabriel and Mary

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28. Filippino Lippi, Annunciate Virgin (tondo) (1483–1484) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

in gilt lettering close to the heart of his composition, as he did in his Cortona Annunciation (see Plate II), he was not simply reverting to his youth as a manuscript illuminator or to archaic pictorial conventions. A traditional view holds that the old-fashioned friar turned away from the mimetic codes of progressive fifteenth-century naturalism.31 Between the columns of the loggia, and the two figures placed within it, we see their contracted exchange in Latin, in three lines drawn from

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Luke’s text, beginning with Gabriel’s salutation as the lowest line.32 Gabriel’s body, too, emits a gilt aura made up of fine, straight lines suggesting both his celestial origins and his sovereign capacity for superhuman motion. In fact, Gabriel is the more physically expressive figure, more fully modeled when compared to the pale, linear, and flatter features of Mary. The artist renders her obedient verbal response in the middle and upside down, a response that comes toward the conclusion of their conversation: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1: 38). The upside-down-ness of Mary’s words has led commentators to several conclusions: first, that this simply distinguishes Mary’s voice from that of Gabriel, whose words bracket hers, curving below and upwards. We might note that the words seem to issue rather more from his hands, rhetorically positioned in deliberate fashion, than from his mouth. Their exchange is implied still more dramatically by the intensity of their locked and level gazes. Their eyes bracket their words more forcefully than either their gestures or their mouths, which are closed. An alternate reading is that her words upside down are thus read immediately by God above her, to whom, through Gabriel, she is truly and more directly speaking. As an erudite Dominican, working here for a Dominican patron, Fra Angelico must have weighed every gesture, just as he mindfully weighed the redemptive typological meaning of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the left corner of the panel, and the human sin that set the drama in motion. The Virgin’s prominent ring also reminds her viewers that this, the Annunciation, is the occasion of her spiritual marriage to God, following as it does her betrothal to Joseph. Certainly, too, the artist’s focus on words as conveying the substance of meaning in the painting recalls the northern tradition, based on the Church Fathers, of the Annunciation (and conception) as effected through Mary’s ear. Their words, extending almost palpably within the stage of the loggia, suggest a dialogical inclusion of the observer, much as the medieval reader of her Book of Hours would have used the image of the Annunciation as a prompt to articulate Gabriel’s greeting, or as Isabella and her companions, beholding the theatrical Annunciation, would have suspended their disbelief. That this immediacy is intended is underscored by the small Pentecostal flame above Gabriel’s hair, reminding us of his multilingual, or supra-lingual, facility. More than this, it is

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underscored by the vibrant rainbow glimmer of his wings, which, as every visitor to Cortona can attest, not only embody the angel’s volatility and inimitable lightning speed but also appear to beat together in rhythm with the shadows and reflections in the room, moving with the movements of his beholder as a wondrous counterpoint to his condescension in speaking human language.33 efh

In stressing Gabriel’s words, with their scribal abbreviations, as a vehicle for the meaning of the Annunciation, Fra Angelico and his colleagues evoke not just the prayer, but also the choir book and hymnal, the union of words with music in song, even such as the Magnificat itself, which was sung by the Virgin on this very occasion. From the thirteenth century onward, reading and praying became increasingly silent activities. To speak aloud before an image and, especially, to sing, were particularly participatory and sensuous ways to reach union with the divine. As a wordless and so more pure approximation of the divine harmonies of the universe, music has always been a special province and metaphor for the angels; that Gabriel so ostentatiously makes use of human speech in his interview with the Virgin reminds his audiences that he has many choices.

“A Sound of Tumult Like the Sounds of a Host”: The Music of Angels The voice of an angel, as it reverberates among earthly places, carries with it the association of the Neoplatonic harmonies of the spheres, linking the immaterial and the divine to the created universe. When the artist, Stefano d’Antonio, inserts a small figure of King David playing his harp in the center of the gilt frame of Bicci di Lorenzo’s Annunciation of c. 1430 (Fig. 29), beneath a star-spangled band, he reinforces the idea of the supernal harmonies.34 In Scripture, David praises the starry skies as manifestations of God’s omnipotence, and he begs the stars, the sun, and the moon to join him in praise of God: “The Heavens declare the glory of God,” he says, as “their line [melody] is gone out through all the earth.” As early as the ninth century, Eriugena, in his commentary on Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, had conceived the filiation between angels and human persons in terms of heavenly hymns of praise, or what he

The Music of Angels

29. Bicci di Lorenzo, Annunciation (tempera and gold leaf on panel) (c. 1431) (164.4 × 144.7 × 25.4 cm) (The Walters Art Museum) (Photo credit: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore)

termed “theodoxic (theodochis) blessings that flow into the heavenly intelligences.”35 These hymns are apprehended by their fortunate human receptors either through images perceived by the senses or yet without image. Although Eriugena’s ideas may not have found their way directly to Italy, it is worth noting his impressively rational definition of celestial music according to three genres: imperceptible (and so superior) musica mundana, inwardly perceptible musica humana, and sensually – that is, externally – perceptible musica instrumentalis, the lowest of the three.36 The point is that for Eriugena, following Dionysius, it was music that conveyed divine knowledge. For the Middle Ages, the “melody” to which David refers is the harmony of the spheres; in his musica humana and musica instrumentalis

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we see an answer to the musica mundana implied by the sheltering sky.37 It is likely for these reasons that Botticini gives David such prominence in his great Assumption where, flanked by angels, he is seated at the center, on axis with the Virgin at the rim of the middle tier of heaven. The Annunciation itself, as Bicci interprets it, might also belong to the fabric of a transcendent musical tapestry so that even the graceful, slow movements of Gabriel and the Virgin seem in musical agreement with the strains of David’s harp above them. The colors of Gabriel’s wings also suggest just such a larger, symbolic intent, as if the one archangel functions as a synecdoche for the collective of his brothers. His feathers progress from his shoulders in their hues from a pale to a deep gold to red and blue, following the colors of the Seraphim and Cherubim; from here, the feathers shift to a darker blue, to orange to red, and then, at the tips, to green, mottled and darker, earthly hues. In this painting, as well, Bicci inscribes extracts of the conversation between the angel and the Virgin into their haloes, an efficient solution that preserves the linear dance of their draperies and the formal integrity of the bedroom and its antechamber.38 Just as Scripture alludes to the sound of their wings as the music of the angels, so, too, the sound of disembodied voices implicates angels’ ethereal harmonies. In Isaiah 6, angels cry to one another the words that become the Sanctus of the Mass while, in Luke, the “multitude of the heavenly host” praise God at their annunciation of the Nativity to the shepherds, the origins, then, of the Mass’s Gloria.39 Augustine himself had been galvanized into conversion by an unseen, youthful voice repeating the injunction to “pick up and read;” a voice from a nearby house that is sometimes understood as “the house of God.”40 In his Coronation (c. 1470–1475) (Plate XX), Neri di Bicci sets the Virgin and Christ against an incised disc of gold that is a contracted reference to the circling bodies of the heavens and the harmony of the spheres that is intimated by the angels. Around the edges of this great, gilded orb, members of an angelic wreath peer while others support the lower edge of the dish where two more angels kneel beside a panel of the Crucifixion. The sphere here also unites the several components of Neri’s panel, allowing for the unmediated witness of all protagonists, earthly and divine: St. John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari look on at the left, with Augustine himself with his mother, Monica, at right. Angels often have a much more explicit role, however, as agents and vehicles for the symphonies of the spheres.

The Music of Angels

In c. 1470, the humanist, Aegidius Carlerius, observed that “God made everything of a certain number. . . . Angels, in fact, comprise of a threefold hierarchy and nine orders. . . . Music is therefore generally accepted: by virtue of number it is found everywhere.”41 In this light, we remember that music belongs to the Quadrivium of the Liberal Arts, and that it is an abstract language governed by perfect and universal principles such as number, order, rhythm, and proportion. When Cosmé Tura’s lutenist angel tunes his instrument as his fellow fiddlers and the organist play, we are reminded of these cosmic qualities, both as metaphors of perfection and as attributes of the angels themselves.42 Music is the province not only of the angelic choirs, specifically recalling the ancient legions of Pseudo-Dionysius, for it is also the province of angels both as dancers and as specialist musicians, equally elegant courtly accompanists or appealingly exuberant masters of joyful noise. In the cupola of the Santuario della Beata Vergine dei Miracoli in Saronno, in the 1530s, Gaudenzio Ferrari, who was a musician himself, painted a jostling throng of music-making angels at the Assumption (Plate XXI). The Virgin herself, as a wooden sculpture standing at the edge of the cupola, is somewhat visually displaced by her companions, who sing from texts and play a variety of instruments. Some among these instruments are more imaginary than real, but the real-life instruments include a zither, flutes, tambourines, a lyre, a lute, and an organ with bellows. This last, the organ, was the first instrument to be permitted in the performance of sacred music within the medieval church interior. There is an irony here, given the myriad musical angels in medieval and Renaissance art, for instrumental music as a whole was late in making its way into the official liturgy where the Word, as song, had long been privileged. Gaudenzio’s pictorially – almost aurally – riotous orchestra, in which boyish angels seem to be competitively attending to one another’s melodies, as well as singing, praying, and dancing, connects to the long tradition of musical angels going back to Psalm 150: 3–5: Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp. Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

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Percussion instruments, however, were regarded as especially profane, quite apart from the general indecorousness of instruments in the church as a rule. The music-making angel seems to be, then, a special example of the union of an idea of the ineffable, divine harmony of the spheres with artistic invenzione. We might take into account the musical elders of Revelation, or the instrumental talents of David with his psaltery, lyre, or harp, as well as those of St. Cecilia with her chitarrone or organ. Nevertheless, the musician angel is a kind of paradox of his kind. This is so even though a musical angel had appeared to St. Francis in the thirteenth century (according to the Fioretti), and even though Thomas of Celano had noted in his Second Life of the saint that an angel played the lyre. When, in 1470, the great musical scholar, Johannes Tinctoris, addressed the question of musical angels, he seemed to voice a contemporary ambivalence about his decorum, noting that “ . . . painters, when wishing to depict the joys of the blessed, paint angels playing various musical instruments. The Church would not allow this unless it believed that the joys of the blessed are enhanced by music.”43 Gaudenzio’s and his colleagues’ fictive instruments perhaps help resolve such ambivalence about portraying music-making within the church. efh

The angel with his instrument receives acknowledgment of his status first simply by reason of his collaboration with his dancing fellows; after all, Psalm 150 refers quite specifically to dance. This art form is directly linked to the mystical metaphors of number and geometry by which Plato, Neoplatonic, and Christian philosophers, such as PseudoDionysius, encapsulated the perfection and interconnectedness of the heavenly spheres. The winsome dancing boys of Luca della Robbia’s Cantoria (c. 1432–1438) (Fig. 30) literally illustrate the words of Psalm 150 that are inscribed on the structure’s horizontal friezes. They keep company with infants and young girls, other children of varying ages who also sing and play instruments, and their circling dance reminds the beholder of the “round dance” as a supreme symbol of cosmic order. Although they may not belong singly to an angelic sodality, these wingless youngsters surely evoke the heavenly hosts, looking up as some clearly do toward the mortal choristers in the Cathedral. These wingless children, in their diverse and unabashedly earthly pursuits, make angels of the living choristers ranked above them.

The Music of Angels

30. Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (marble) (1431/2–1438) (328 × 560 cm) (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Fra Angelico, again with characteristic mindfulness, also understood dance as a symbol of the soul’s bliss on attaining lasting blessedness. For him, this bliss could take the form of the “chain dance,” as in his San Marco Last Judgment (see Plate XVII), or as enacted by angels and saints in the Uffizi Coronation (see Plate I). That same round or choral dance – which may not, in fact, have ever been performed in this way – appears with spectacular dramatic and symbolic effect in Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (c. 1500) (Fig. 31), unaccompanied by instruments, although three angels on the stable’s roof hold books.44 Here, the artist seems to intend a reference to the eternal harmonies of the spheres figured by the circle of the dancers, whose order and rhythm magnify the point of the salvific healing assured by the advent of Christ.45 Alongside the notion that dance was a metaphor for the joys and rewards of the redeemed soul, dance was also an ancient philosophical metaphor for the hierarchical relations between the Creator and his dominion. The stars, the gods, and the angels all danced; for Plato, the planets and stars were dancing gods.46 The Church Father, St. Basil (330–379 C.E.), made note of dancing angels, in particular, seeing in the human attempt to imitate their ring-dance (choreia) a sign of blessedness. Continuing to fuse ancient Greek and Christian forms, he also considered such blessedness to accrue to those who, at dawn, gave praise to the Creator, who is suggestively Apollo-like in this context, with hymns and prayers.47 The angels will carry the forbearing Christian heavenward after his earthly suffering, and Christ will welcome him, saying: “You will join in the never-ending dance, and

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31. Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity (tempera on canvas) (c. 1500) (109 × 75 cm) (National Gallery of Art, London) (Photo credit: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY)

wear your crown in the sight of the angels, ruling under the King over His creatures and living blessedly in the company of the blessed.”48 By the late fourth century, the dance of the angels was a kind of commonplace. Pseudo-Dionysius endowed the motif with persuasive and mystical potency in light of his assumed connection to St. Paul who had revealed to him the true character of heaven.49

The Music of Angels

One of the earliest pictorial combinations of angel musicians as a type for the universe’s harmony dates to 1317, and it shows Dionysius writing as he gazes upward to the Nine Choirs in triads who rim the arcs of the spheres underneath the Trinity.50 The melody-making angels are a curiosity in their own way because Dionysius speaks only of the noiseless movements of heaven. Dante, however, while generally following Dionysius, incorporates musical angels into his cosmos so that, in Purgatorio (30, 92), the angel’s song is nothing but the echo of the spheres’ eternal melody.51 At the height of the celestial rose, furthermore, in Paradiso 31, 1, Dante lent a special, contemporaneous imprimatur to the motif of the musical angel as a code for the Dionysian harmony of the spheres. In the circling “crystalline heaven” of his Paradise, the Nine Orders lived in nine glimmering orbs. The Cherubim at their inner rim are the neighbors of the fixed stars, and they are the first order to hear the spheres’ music. Dionysius’s very concept of hierarchy, however, articulated as it was in terms of a triadic, interconnected, and circular universe, broadly implicated Neoplatonic constructs of number, concord, and arrangement that were naturally congenial to music and dance. These abstract elements resounded in each human soul, which thereby ascended through the spinning circles to God himself at their center.52 That this movement expressed itself for Pseudo-Dionysius in the metaphor of dance reinforces, as well, his advocacy of silence and of the image, as opposed to word and sound, as the most effective and most reverent means of transmitting the identity of the ineffable.53 Thus, three specific actions – circular rotation, straightforward extension – when an angel extends his arms to help his inferior partner – and the spiraling motion of the gathered hosts as they revolve around God – suggest a choral dance: “for each of the holy Orders of Angels both lead and are led . . . each is led by those above itself, and in turn leads those below.”54 When Marsilio Ficino translated Pseudo-Dionysius’s Divine Names, along with his translations into Latin of Plato and Plotinus, he contributed to the propagation of Dionysius’s and Dante’s imagery of dancing angels among humanist and literary circles. At the same time, he promoted dance’s antique and sacred associations, maintaining, too, the ancient tradition, as suggested by Plato, by Hesiod’s dancing Muses, and Lucian’s “primordial” cosmic dance, of dance’s links to the forces of love itself.55 As Timaeus explained, the superior quality of the gift to

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humankind of sight was that it permitted perception of the heavenly bodies’ rhythmic dance, facilitating, as well, the healing of the disordered soul so that it achieved its true and perfect circular movement. Without the sense of sight, humankind would not have been able to conceive of number or time, nor from this accomplishment to inquire as to the fabric of the universe itself.56 Philosophers of the Pythagorean school reiterated the ubiquitous numerical underpinnings of the cosmos, with special implications for dance.57 For Plotinus, the symbol of the joined hands of choral dancers represents harmony, peace, and unity, each participant offering his own distinctive contribution but keeping in step with his partners.58 In this sense, Plotinus intended the Greek harmonia, meaning not the concord of a group of sounds (which, in Greek, would be symphonia) but, rather, the orderly adjustment of parts in a complex fabric; then, in particular, the tuning of a musical instrument; and finally the musical scale, composed of several notes yielded by the tuned strings. What we call the ‘modes’ would be to the Greek harmoniai.59

The cosmos at large, then, is like one coordinated dancer, yet each soul must look toward God at the center in order to sing and dance “in an eternal present,” striving ultimately to attain that still center.60 For Ficino, the Three Graces subsumed other classical and venerable triads, such as those of Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius, for they were a kind of archetypal image of the circular dance of the spheres, the soul, and the angels around God.61 Above the ill-fated Katherine, in King Henry VIII, a “blessed troop of angels,” dressed in white and holding garlands of bays, dance around her at her death.62 Milton, too, makes an analogy between dancing stars and dancing angels.63 Angels do not dance in Scripture, although sacred dance – as that of David before the Ark (2 Samuel 6: 14), or of Miriam rejoicing at the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 15: 20) – was a heightened form of worship, especially in Jewish lore and commentary. Dancing angels appear before Jacob, for example, as he leaves Laban’s house, and an angel of God danced beside the Red Sea, furnishing light for the Jews and darkness for the Egyptians.64 Although the Church Fathers may occasionally have been judgmental about the evils and profanity of dancing, they allowed for dance as a mode of connecting the believer to

The Music of Angels

souls in Paradise. “We raise the head and lift the hands to Heaven,” judged Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 C.E.): and set the feet in motion at the closing utterance of prayer . . . endeavouring to abstract the body from the earth along with the discourse, raising the soul aloft, winged with longing for better things we compel it to advance to the region of holiness magnanimously despising the chain of the flesh.65

The work of the Renaissance dance theorist and master, Guglielmo Ebreo (also known as Giovanni Ambrosio after his Christian conversion), combined Neoplatonic philosophy, an appreciation of music as a Liberal Art or a “liberal science of sublime and high value,” and cerebral reflections on the metaphysical essence of dance itself. The “sweet consonance” of music “comforts all our senses,” he wrote in his treatise on dance, while dancing itself “is nothing other than an action that shows outwardly the spiritual movements, which must agree with the measures and perfect concords of harmony. These descend into our intellect through our hearing and to the senses of the heart with delight.”66 As a founder of the Lombard school of dancing, and as a much-traveled luminary among the northern Italian courts, including Ferrara, Milan, Mantua, Padua, Urbino, Forlì, and Venice, he was likely influential among patrons, artists, musicians, designers, actors, and dancers. When it came to modeling an angel in any medium or to embodying an angel on the stage, these definitions of music and movement found their reverberations. Dance, for Guglielmo, was spiritual in origin; it was in concord with harmonies that, in their turn, speak to our minds and emotions, bringing sensations of pleasure and sentiment that in their nature must find bodily expression; thus, the dancer must perform “in perfect harmony with the measured sound of song and instrumental music,” participating in the “great harmonical chain that joins Nature and human existence.”67 In these ways, too, Guglielmo reiterates Neoplatonic and Pythagorean theories of number and proportion, linking, by means of reason and order, the performers and the performance to the Creator himself and his creation. At a banquet in Pesaro in 1475, for example, 120 young men danced a piva at which one saw “banners and trimmings and feathers and golden filigree, all moving at the same time with dignified rhythm.” Perhaps these youths, too, were envisaged

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as or understood to be angels. Preceding this spectacle there was another ballet that displayed the planets’ movements, “Cum l’orden lor per lo celeste regno,” and how “cum altre girarchie, che in cel fe’ dio. El mouer lieto de sue habitatione. El zodiaco et le lucente stelle. Facendo signi, et pace et unione.”68 The Pythagorean movement of the stars, together with its Platonic reception and reinforcement in Renaissance high culture, ensured that dance held its own among the arts. Often, the maestro di ballo was also the composer, lending a potential consistency of vision and execution to the entertainment.69 From here, it is a natural step to perceive in the circling figures of dancing angels – figures who in themselves signify higher knowledge – not only the ideal union of “natural” movement and “accidental” music, but also an affirmative rehearsal of the pristine mechanics of the cosmos. The angels remind their beholders of how, in the worldly arts of music and dance, and by way of the human senses and the intellect, the mortal practitioner also emulates – and even feels – those same cosmic vibrations. efh

The earliest portrayals of angel musicians appear in conjunction with the Seven Trumpets of the Apocalypse in Revelation 8. Trumpeter angels are not limited to the Christian context. In Islam, the Archangel Michael also blows a trumpet, and he is represented in this undertaking in manuscript illuminations, reminding us that a representational tradition belongs to Muslim visual culture.70 In Hebrew tradition and in Early Christian writings, angels articulate their praise for God in music, as they do, for example, in the Jewish apocalyptic second Book of Enoch where the soul of Enoch, moving through the heavens, meets both vocal and instrumental music: “In the midst of the heavens I saw armed soldiers, serving the Lord, with tympana and organs, with incessant voice . . . wonderful and marvelous is the singing of those angels.”71 By the fourteenth century, musical angels appear on the pages of French and Italian illuminated manuscripts, beginning with the strings whose instruments ranked above winds in the musical hierarchy. With characteristic precociousness, Giotto painted angels with double pipe and recorder at the edge of his Annunciation in the Scrovegni Chapel, as well as trumpeters at his Last Judgment. These are the celestial counterparts to the

The Music of Angels

earthly instrumentalists at the wedding of the Virgin. The artist’s Baroncelli Polyptych (c. 1334) in Santa Croce, Florence, shows reverent angels playing trumpets, shawms, a portative organ, and vielle as their confrères sing.72 We should allow, too, for reciprocity among the arts. Might Giotto and others have had in mind the boys who featured as angels in sacred drama, making at once both credible and inexplicably magical each artistic form by way of cross-referencing them?73 Vasari, for example, in his life of Fra Bartolomeo, describes an image of St. Bartholomew: with two children playing, one on a lute, and the other on a lyre . . . with a leg drawn up and his instrument resting on it, and with hands touching the strings in the act of running over them, an ear intent on the harmony, the head upraised, and the mouth slightly open, in such a way that whoever beholds him cannot persuade himself that he should not also hear the voice.74

Musical angels are frequent companions to the Virgin, singly or as small ensembles. Barnaba da Modena’s unruly instrumentalists kneel in front of the Coronation in his polyptych (1374).75 Jacobello del Fiore included seven musicians at the base of his elaborate, multitiered, Gothic throne in his Coronation (see Fig. 18), as did Gentile da Fabriano in his Valle Romita Polyptych (c. 1400–1410) where eight orderly players are seated on a curving ledge.76 As early as 1455–1460, Giovanni di Piermatteo da Camerino Boccati produced his Madonna of the Orchestra (Madonna and Child with Musical and Singing Angels) in which fourteen angels in two companies praise the Virgin and Child with lute, tambourine, cymbals, rebec, bagpipe, and harp. A winged putto in the foreground, at the left of the inlaid marble throne, plucks the strings of a portative organ as his musical companion at the right plays the psaltery with small batons. Artists in the North were just as taken by the potential of the angel musician, if not more so, perhaps as a reflection of the rich musical cultures of northern Europe. Northern composers and singers made their way across the Alps, joining the princely courts or offering their services to cardinals and popes in Rome.77 In the late fifteenth century, Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ apocalyptic Virgin and Child (Plate XXII) in her glowing oval of light receives the loving gazes of fourteen Seraphim and Cherubim, beside whom twelve angels hold

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the instruments of the Passion. Encircling these and the angels at her head, with banners inscribed “Sanctus,” are by far the larger group, a swarm of twenty-three angels with instruments ranging from lute, shawm, vielle, hand bell, pipe with snare drum, hurdy-gurdy, jingle bells, clapper, trumpet, bagpipe, organ, clavichord, cromorne, dulcimer, and pot.78 Demarcated by the colors and lines of their spheres, the appearance of instruments underscores the ancient concept of the revolving, celestial spheres going back to Babylonian times, through Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, and Boethius to Dante himself.79 The Christ Child holds jingle bells, exchanging an ardent gaze with one small angel to the left who holds his own set of bells, reinforcing by this duet the idea of the universe’s concord that is set in motion by God. Where the Nine Orders are more carefully identified, as in Botticini’s grandiose vision, angel musicians seem to be less evident, but where they are engaged, they invite ingenious solutions. In Fra Angelico’s San Domenico altarpiece, Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, we see an inclusive, even encyclopedic selection of instruments, reflecting, perhaps, his wish to appeal to the sensory imaginations of his viewers.80 These would have been not only his fellow Dominicans but also, primarily, the laity looking at this side altar in the nave. Here, the artist paints angels with rebecs, fiddles, harps, lutes, psalteries, organs, trumpets, shawms, tambourines, double-pipe, cymbals, and tabor. Only missing is the bagpipe, which, although an appropriately humble instrument for shepherds, is perhaps not decorous for an angel.81 The artist seems to have intended to follow Psalm 150 to the letter, given the specificity and proliferation of his instruments, and taking into account, as well, the Hebrew and Latin Bibles’ readings of organo as both “pipe” and “piped instrument.”82 The pipe and tabor player, moreover, who by their inclusion suggest dance, lead their angelic associates along. With one foot poised off the ground, they might as well be dancing as walking.83 This jovial company provides a counter-balance to the ranks of red and pink Seraphim at the top left of the altarpiece, and the Cherubim in blue, at the upper right. When, in c. 1499, Lorenzo Costa painted his intriguing Adoration of the Shepherds with Angels (see Plate V), he revived the Nine Choirs as a consciously archaic iconography. He portrays his Nine Choirs in segregated, cloudy theater boxes, each playing carefully delineated instruments.84 At the top, his angels play lyres, then, descending, they

The Music of Angels

hold fiddles, lutes, tabors, rebecs, organs, alto shawms, tambourines, and tenor shawms. Costa varies his color codes so that, although the Seraphim wear red, the order beneath them wears green. All Nine Orders, moreover, have or suggest full-bodied figures, and they are brought together in a collegial way as witnesses to the Nativity by two trumpeting angels on ledges outside the cave. In his own lofty seat, Christ with his Cross, accompanied by angels carrying the instruments of the Passion, looks on, as child angels lean out, their scrolls trailing earthward. In this one small painting, which was likely destined for a private context, Costa deftly provides a diagram of the redemptive purpose of the Incarnation that is magnified both by music and the authoritative hierarchies of the angels.85 Among Coronation subjects, Zanobi di Jacopo Machiavelli’s version of 1474 (Fig. 32) is not unusual in its inclusion of two groups of musician

32. Zanobi Machiavelli, Coronation of the Virgin (for Santa Croce, Pisa) (panel) (1474) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

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angels. One ensemble plays from behind the throne, another in front. The angels behind include a bagpipe player, an angel with pipe and drum, five trumpeters, a jingle drummer, and a cymbals player. Zanobi was at least as mindful of a need for compositional clarity and symmetry as he was for musicological accuracy, and so the angelic trumpeter appears too often.86 In his own sumptuous, thirteenthcentury Coronation (Fig. 33), Paolo Veneziano also included two angel

33. Paolo Veneziano, Coronation of the Virgin (panel) (167 × 285 cm) (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

The Music of Angels

musicians at the front, and an attentive gathering at the back, including an organetti player, as well as the psaltery and dulcimer.87 In Zanobi’s case, the audible results of winds and percussion would have been striking, calling to mind less the restrained and subtle harmonies of Paolo Veneziano and more the boisterous, celebratory strains of outdoor processions and festivals.88 In this way, perhaps Zanobi meant to suggest the cheerful cacophony accompanying the Virgin’s Assumption, her motion heavenwards and, following that, the stately ceremonial once she arrived. In his foreground, we have a singer, placed behind a lutenist, a treble flauto dolce performer, and a string player who wields an instrument that the artist would have called a viola, which was essentially an early model of the lira da braccio.89 This little haloed group supplies a gentler, more refined three or four-part polyphony, and they anticipate the small and urbane string orchestras of Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, and Luca Signorelli, among others.90 These different bands possessed distinct functions in real life, from performing at dances, banquets, and pageants to featuring in more elevated and intimate events where subtlety and the poetic interlacing of words and music might have been better apprehended. In his Assumption and Coronation (1480s) (Fig. 34), the Flemish Master of the St. Lucy Legend offers an intricate tableau in which the Virgin, again of the crescent moon, is carried by eight angelic bearers to heaven as two pairs above her sing, two sheets of music at either side.91 These contain, in alto and tenor clef, the beginning of the Ave Regina. At left and right, eight angels, four on each side, play an organetto, trumpet, shawm, and harp (left), and shawm, vielle, shawm, and lute (right), thus combining loud and soft tones against those of the voices.92 Through a high porthole in the clouds, the Trinity waits to crown the imminent Virgin, seated on a cloth of honor held aloft by three angels; as they wait, they are entertained, on the left, by eleven singers with music books, divided in two, and, on the right, by six instrumentalists on recorders, lute, dulcimer, and harp. This inner heaven seems plausibly to convey actual earthly practices, that is, an arrangement of singers and musicians who may well have performed together; yet the two heavens’ repertories are likely not meant to be imagined as occurring simultaneously. In any case, while Mary’s Assumption, happening once, perhaps requires only the more impermanent form of sheet

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34. Master of the St. Lucy Legend, Assumption of the Virgin (oil on panel) (c. 1485–1500) (199 × 182 cm) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) (Photo credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

music, the Trinity mandates eternal and more formal celebration, hence the book.93 While it is to take a risk to assign earthly performance practices to angels, it does seem that they can inform us of earthly instruments that have otherwise been lost to the record. Michael Pacher’s trumpeting angels, among the woodcarvings above the Coronation for St. Wolfgang in Austria (1471–1481), play folded instruments that indicate, by the differing ways in which they are each held, that they are an early, sliding form of trumpet, like a modern trombone. These are a type that is otherwise not securely documented.94

The Music of Angels

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When, in 1489–1491, Filippino Lippi portrayed six musician angels dancing and playing among the clouds beside Mary at her Assumption in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he drew together with characteristic economy and sophistication the theology of the Incarnation, shown in the Annunciation directly below on the altar wall, with the triumphant symbolism of the Virgin’s ascent to heaven (Plate XXIII). Winds, strings, and percussion sound together as three angel companions push up from the ledge of the frame, carrying the putto-cloud that forms her platform. As in established medieval angelology, nine angels circle the Virgin. As a Dominican program, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa’s funerary memorial necessarily emphasizes his order’s veneration of Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor” himself, who appears on the right wall in the lunette of The Miracle and, below this, in triumph over heresy; he also appears beside Carafa in the Annunciation.95 Carafa chose to dedicate his monument to Aquinas and the Virgin of the Annunciation with an eye, no doubt, not only to his role as Protector of the Dominican Order but also to the feast days of each which the pope and College of Cardinals commemorated at the church.96 The Annunciation was also the predominant event chosen by homilists at the papal court, rather than the Nativity or Crucifixion, by which to illustrate the mystery of the Redemption. Each of the pictorial subjects in the chapel relates to the tripartite structure of Aquinas’s Summa, so that the side walls link with Parts One and Two, and the altar wall with Part Three.97 Thomas himself had considered the three-fold import of the Annunciation and its meaning in his Summa. First, Gabriel’s greeting was meant to encourage the Virgin to think deeply about these matters; second, the angel informed her of the mystery of the Incarnation; and, finally, he had to ensure her consent.98 Fifteenth-century preachers and commentators, such as Fra Bernardino of Siena and Antoninus of Florence, understandably tended to concentrate rather more on the Virgin and her fitness for her role than on Gabriel and his comportment, although Antoninus did note that the Archangel’s robes should be clear rather than red; this perhaps explains the noticeably lighter hues of his attire – blue, green, and cream – in Lippi’s fresco.99 In being set apart in the composition from the Virgin, Carafa, and St. Thomas, Lippi’s Gabriel seems to play an exceptionally

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minor role in this encounter, perhaps in part because of Carafa’s own audacious occupation of the foreground at the right. Gabriel must step up with an attitude of shy supplication toward the Virgin as she moves with equally diplomatic modesty toward her mortal visitors, glancing back and motioning with her body to the right. This grouping in itself asserts the chapel’s dedication, as well as the Marian theology that underpins the program as a whole; it models, too, the meditative and empathetic spiritual practices propounded by twelfth-century authors and revived in the fifteenth century.100 The Dominicans in both Rome and Florence were pioneers of this active, image-based devotional culture, and Carafa may well have felt himself entitled to this fictive audience as patron of the space and as a distinguished Dominican. The receding vault above Gabriel in fact reproduces the ceiling of the cardinal’s burial chamber on the left side of the chapel, while possibly also functioning as a referent to the symbolic porta clausa of the Virgin.101 St. Antoninus was quite specific about the porta clausa as a symbol for the Incarnation, and he joined it to the idea of salvation and entry into the heavenly Jerusalem. Both Christ and the Virgin constituted the Temple’s gates, one open and one closed.102 The theological didacticism of the chapel’s iconography is enlivened by a versatile range of angelic types who act as stage hands, as well as musicians, as decorative architectural ornament in grisaille, and as sympathetic companions even to the antique sibyls. Here, in fact, Lippi is responding directly to Aquinas’s Summa, for angels are otherwise rare companions to the sibyls of antiquity. For Thomas, angels were a measure of the gift of prophecy, which they passed on to humankind from God. “Now the Divine ordering, according to Dionysius,” he wrote: is such that the lowest things are directed by middle things. Now the angels hold a middle position between God and men, in that they have a greater share in the perfection of the Divine goodness than men have. Wherefore the Divine enlightenments and revelations are conveyed from God to men by the angels. Now prophetic knowledge is bestowed by Divine enlightenment and revelation. Therefore it is evident that it is conveyed by the angels.103

To emphasize her importance, Lippi also gives the Cumaean Sibyl four, rather than two, angel attendants in her vault compartment; like their

The Music of Angels

peers, they sit among putti in the clouds. The Cumaean Sibyl, whose identity is intimately bound to Rome itself, is also the only seer visible from outside the chapel space, and the only one to gesture heavenwards, as she does with unusual flourish.104 But it is the angels in Lippi’s Assumption – revolving around the Virgin, peeking from underneath her garment, extending incense burners and long tapers in whose smoky mandorlas small angel heads are formed – who are the true inventions of the cycle; they must also have inspired Raphael’s cloud putti.105 The angel musicians are dynamic in their movements, and they call into question Aquinas’s own critique of instruments, particularly the flute and harp, as opposed to vocal music, because they court the wrong emotions. “Now it is evident,” he wrote, “that the human soul is moved in various ways according to various melodies of sound. . . . Hence the use of music in the divine praises is a salutary institution, that the soul of the faint-hearted may be the more incited to devotion.”106 Filippino, however, earns respect among music historians for the accuracy of his record, and not least for his trombone at the far left, rather than the slide trumpet, and as described by Johannes Tinctoris in the later 1480s.107 Carafa, who seems to have been a patron of music, may well have known Tinctoris through the networks of the Neapolitan court. Less accurate are Lippi’s musicians as a viable ensemble since, in addition to the trombone, he includes an angel below beating a threestringed tambourin du Béarn with a stick while blowing simultaneously on a long flute de vielleurs.108 Beside the Virgin at left, a dancing angel plays the tambourine; beside the cloud, at the lower right, another beats a drum decorated with Carafa’s red and white colors, as his neighbor hits a metal frame rattling with rings. A bagpipe player at the upper right sounds an earthy, if not subversive note with his instrument, which is also bedecked in red and white, taking the lead perhaps among the group whose draperies, tassels, and ribbons unfurl in an eddying dance of their own.109 Rather than a religious gathering, these figures recall dance processions and theater, so that this robustly sensorial troupe brings with it more an air of the festival or pageant; Lippi was experienced and gifted in these arts.110 Hoisted as she is on her cloud, the Virgin’s ascent also evokes the machinery of the sacra rappresentazione which the angels, as stage hands, often seem to suggest.111 Lippi further played with levels

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of reality in depicting a vermilion banner, a curious detail in itself, that is suspended from a rod and hangs behind the real, gilded molding of the altarpiece’s frame; the red cords from which the banner is suspended are held taut at either side of the fictive architecture by putti who also see to securing its lower borders.112 Like their earlier counterparts in Donatello’s Cavalcanti Altar, these putti are only distant cousins of their angelic brethren, acting with practical good humor as they literally reinforce the trappings of Lippi’s fictive display. The banner establishes that the rotating angels above, two of whose feet are hidden, as well as the Virgin herself, move behind both it and the altarpiece. The angel was a key player in fifteenth-century experiments in the fictive potential of the apse. Perhaps no project was more adventurous than that of Melozzo da Forlì’s Ascension of Christ for SS. Apostoli, completed about thirty years after his collaborator, Antoniazzo Romano, had finished Bessarion’s chapel in that church. Within the expansive aerial vista of his sky, Melozzo painted at least ten musician angels beside and below Christ, whose open arms suggest the wheeling motions of the heavens, echoed, as well, in the torsos and wings of the multiple blue Cherubim and hints of the red Seraphim behind him.113 The subject itself, the Ascension, was highly unusual for a Renaissance apse, and Melozzo seems, in fact, to have elided this subject, which was more typical of paintings on a smaller scale, with that of the Second Coming of Christ before the Day of Judgment.114 He may have been inspired to do this given his patron’s wishes for a redemptive celestial arena for his tomb in SS. Apostoli, and by medieval traditions of theophany that tied these two narratives together. Close to life-size, expertly foreshortened, illumined, and colored with combinations of gilding and saturated hues, Melozzo’s angels are fitting descendents of their medieval musical forbears.115 They comprise a small orchestra of mixed instruments, combining percussion, as in the tambourine, with strings, including the lute (Fig. 35). Their wings offer surprising color mixes, such as a blue-green that shades into rose through orange. Melozzo brought together in this grandiose vision of heaven and earth a shrewdly coordinated symphony of sound and color. Given his training, which may have included studies with Piero della Francesca, as well as his cultivated Roman setting, Melozzo’s selection of musical and painterly harmonies, in concert with a mathematically

The Music of Angels

35. Melozzo da Forlì, Angel (from SS. Apostoli, Rome) (fresco) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

precise system of foreshortenings, was laid out and executed with a consciousness of the past and of the inventions that had preceded him. Angels remained the Virgin’s companions in compositions well into the sixteenth century and beyond. Gaudenzio Ferrari’s jostling throng gave way to self-possessed, professional angel musicians, such as those in Orazio Samacchini’s drawings for his Madonna and Child with Angel Musicians, St. Petronius, and Mary Magdalene in Santa Maria della Concezione, Bologna.116 Flanked by two groups of angels, the Virgin is fêted by a harp at the left and a viol at right. In his sensitive preliminary drawing for the viol player (Plate XXIV), evidently based on a study

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36. Orazio Samacchini, Madonna and Child in a Glory of Music-Making Angels with the Magdalene and St. Petronius (oil on canvas) (239 × 233.5 cm) (Saltram House, Plympton, Devon) (Photo credit: © National Trust Images)

from life, Samacchini shows just how careful he was to place the musician’s hands on the instrument, experimenting in several pentimenti with the placement of the bow. His observational powers lend sensory authenticity to his painted music-making angel at the Madonna’s side (Fig. 36).

Jacob’s Ladder Seek truth and beauty together; you will never find them apart. With the Angel of Truth your mind may wrestle, like Jacob: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me”: but Beauty is the Angel of the Annunciation, before whom the soul must be still as a handmaid: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”117

Jacob’s Ladder

When Jacob lay down to sleep on his stone pillow: he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendents . . .”118

When Jacob awoke, he was afraid, and concluded that: “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” He called the place Bethel.119 Since at least the first century C.E., Jacob’s ladder has been an enduring image, recalled as an allegory that ranges in its associations from the movement of the human soul to its destiny; the vicissitudes and struggles of earthly life; the experience of exile; and, in Christian exegesis and religious praxis, to the path of the ascetic and the monk. In the New Testament, in John (1: 51), we read, further: “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”120 For Origen, reflecting on the passage in Genesis in an interpretation that was congenial with that of other Christian commentators, each neophyte encounters two ladders: the ladder of the ascetic who increases in virtue by his climb, and the ladder of the soul after death that leads him to God’s light. In many religions, the ladder could be one of many divine symbols. In Genesis, Jacob is, in fact, singled out by the angels. After his dream, during his journey back to Canaan, he is met by the angels of God, whom he calls “God’s army,” and on the eve of his meeting with Esau, his brother, he wrestled alone with a man “until the breaking of day,” and prevailed, despite incurring injury (Genesis 32: 1–32). Given the name Israel, and blessed by his enigmatic adversary, Jacob then recognized that he “had seen God face to face,” and yet his life was spared.121 Inspired by Jacob’s ladder, the intrepid philosopher, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, suggested that humankind could aspire to the level of angels for whom the ladder was a mode both of ascent and descent.122 In this light, his angels belonged not only to Judeo-Christian culture but also to the prisca theologia, or “ancient theology,” investigated by a new generation of philosophers. The prisca theologia comprised a body of religious truth that God unveiled not only to the ancient Hebrews, but also to the founders of other ancient religions. The angel became a player

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in a special kind of syncretic discourse that ranged across history and across religious cultures, even as he was still heir to his origins in Aristotelianism and Christianity. Pico was regarded in his day, along with Marsilio Ficino, as one of Florence’s eminent Neoplatonists, and although he was a close reader of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Aquinas, his angelology was adapted to an overriding idea of the significance of the philosopher’s calling. After early travels in Italy and France, Pico returned to Italy in 1485, where he renewed his studies in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.123 He traveled to Rome, via Arezzo, in the 1480s. His nine hundred theses, or Conclusiones, were published in Rome in 1486, the same year in which he wrote his famous introduction to that enterprise, his Oration, which was never delivered. His aim, in this storied incident, was to introduce his magisterial intellectual project as the subject for public debate.124 Pico aimed to build a new Christian theology that was all the more strong for its incorporation of other belief traditions, and stronger, too, because of the mutual mysteries that these comparisons – whether pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu – uncovered.125 In February 1487, however, Innocent VIII suspended the anticipated disputation of the theses, and a commission of inquiry found the majority of them heretical; to this, Pico replied with his Apologia in which he returned to the motifs of substance and accident of the theses. Nonetheless, in August of that year, the Conclusiones were banned, and Pico left Rome for France where he was imprisoned. Returning to Florence on his release, and in partial retirement at the villa of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he composed, among other works, his Expositiones in Psalmos, which owed much to Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos. He also wrote his Heptaplus (1488–1489), which was also condemned as heretical; in this work, Pico endeavored to outline an exegesis of Creation in Genesis according to mystical Jewish tradition and according to sybilline prophecy, uniting thereby the Old Testament with the revelations of other belief systems. Pico used angels in his famous speech as paradigms for human progress to virtue. This purpose suggests that, for Renaissance philosophers, the angels could be at once labile metaphors and authentic creatures in their own right. In this way, Pico follows in the footsteps of the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, even as he often brings

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to bear different kinds of evidence, including the fruits of his Greek and Hebrew learning. Veering close in his work to Origen, as well, he urged human persons to become angels and to depart from their mortal nature in their flight toward the divine. Although wise men from the Orient and ancient Egypt opined that man is the greatest wonder, angels should impress us more, he observed, in the course of his interpretation of Genesis.126 Adam is given a choice as to whether he rises or falls: “You will determine that nature by your own choice,” God tells Adam, “on your own, as molder and maker, duly appointed to decide, you may shape yourself in the form that you prefer.”127 Adam has four initial choices among the works of Creation – the plants, animals, heavenly, and angelic beings – and these options correspond with the vegetative, sensual, rational, and intellectual powers of his soul. God also gives Adam a final, fifth choice should he wish to persevere beyond these limits. The way to this destination is inward as well as upward, for if the person “draws himself into the center of his unity, becoming a spirit and one with God, this being who has been placed above all things will transcend them all in the lonely darkness of the Father.”128 Pico synthesizes profoundly ancient themes, with roots in Pythagorean philosophical culture, in his articulation of humankind’s escape from worldly snares. Through his Florentine connections, he is also, more immediately, the heir to the Origenist inclinations of Matteo Palmieri, who had equally moved in Medicean circles; he had died, however, when Pico was twelve. Both Florentines had speculated, by way of the angels, on the character of free will and the human soul in relation to the angels.129 Together, as literary luminaries in their day who provoked Church censure for their sympathies, they might be recognized as the two most important figures in the world of Renaissance angelology. Together, searching for philosophical arguments about the human desire for virtue, the attainment of the good life, and heavenly reward, they pushed medieval definitions of angels to their furthest limits, and then, in startling ways, surpassed them. Origen had much to do with this, although Pico kept his sources close to his chest; he enjoyed referring to “secrets” and “mysteries,” rather prudently weighing Origen’s personal salvation in the theses as well as castigating him outright.130 Nevertheless, when Pico published his Conclusiones in 1486, he facilitated the growing revival of Origen, whose On First Principles had been published in 1481.

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Earlier in the century, in Florence, Matteo Palmieri may well have been in contact with the learned Camaldolese friar, Ambrogio Traversari, who had discovered thirty-nine of Origen’s homilies, translated by Jerome, in Rome in the 1430s.131 Palmieri and Traversari may have exchanged ideas in the context of the intellectual gatherings at the propitiously named Florentine monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli.132 Origen’s works became increasingly available at the turn of the century, including the edition of Aldus Manutius of some of Origen’s homilies, translated by Jerome, published in 1503.133 This occurred ten years after Pope Alexander VI had absolved Pico. Aldus’s preface stated outright how divisive a figure Origen was, even though, he said, Pico, a man of “marvelous erudition” and “wisdom,” addressed this question in his Apologia.134 In 1512, a complete edition of Origen was published (followed by reprinting in 1519 and 1522), and even Erasmus set to preparing one, although it was only published after his death.135 In 1525, the French scholar, Noël Béda, went so far as to reproach Erasmus for preferring Origen to Augustine.136 Erasmus had ventured to claim that one page of Origen’s taught him more than ten of Augustine; this shocked his correspondent.137 As for Pico, in his Heptaplus, he pursued further the relations of angels and persons, and the human capacity for either ascent or descent; occupying different places in the celestial hierarchy, men and angels are brothers. For him, citing Plato, the human soul preexisted in the universe; further, and in contrast to Palmieri, humankind possesses a kind of superiority over the angels through the grace of Christ.138 Among Pico’s ancient influences may have been the writings of Iamblichus (c. 250–325 C.E.). Plato’s teachers had passed on to him these ascetical and moral ideologies from their own teachers, the Pythagoreans of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E.139 Human persons are capable of succumbing to the lower, bestial realms just as much as they are empowered to ascend to the celestial territories. In this, the commonly given title of the oration, “On the Dignity of Man,” is simplistic. “Who would not wonder,” Pico asks, as he reflects on human potential, “at this chameleon?” But the animal kingdom, he found, actually offers rather ambiguous examples of the mixing of bodily parts, as well as of metamorphosis, as in the case of the lizard. Only the angelic world truly promises unconditionally affirmative examples of transformation. Enoch, in Genesis, is one example, for the Kabbalists considered him to be the angel of the Shekinah, or Divine Presence, which is a character of divinity hypostasized in the

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Kabbalistic works with which Pico was familiar.140 Angels, then, were a kind of solution to the whole question of human frailty and human triumph, for Pico asserts that, should one aspire to the angelic, the body is then surpassed in favor of the mind and soul. If one is tied to the body’s sensual identity, “scratching where it itches and enslaved by the senses,” then one is bewitched, like Calypso’s pigs, or worse. The philosopher is lifted heavenwards by his reason.141 While human mutability is marvelous, it is also unreliable.142 For Pico, the point for humankind of the divine gift of choice is to fulfill “a holy ambition to scorn the things of earth, . . . despise those of heaven, and then, leaving behind whatever is of the world, . . . [to] fly up to the hypercosmic court nearest the most exalted divinity, . . . [with the] Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones.”143 One must not only spurn the earth, but also even the heavens themselves, yearning for the place of the angels beyond, becoming “their rivals for dignity and glory.” Mankind’s dignity is bound to the emulation of the angels, even though one must take into account the Fall of the Angels referred to in Psalms 49 and 82.144 Looked at in one way, their very fall suggests an assimilation of their nature with humankind’s, although Pico does not directly propose this. How, then, Pico asks, can we aspire to be like the angels who dwell closest to God, that is, the three highest orders, the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones? The first two orders are noted in the Hebrew Bible; they “protect, praise, purify, and expiate, mainly in ritual and eschatological contexts.”145 The New Testament Epistles mention the Thrones; this, in itself, helps illustrate Dionysius’s resonance with Paul. Pico, then, follows Dionysius and his medieval analysts closely in ideating the three orders, which he does according to their modes of being – active, contemplative, unitive – and their psychological operations – judgment, contemplation, love – as well as according to their substance – solidity, light, and fire.146 Persons might hope to live as the Thrones, who are angels of judgment, if they are dedicated to the “active life and concerned . . . with lower things.” Others might ascend higher to contemplation, to “gleam with Cherubic light,” and others, attaining the peak of love, burn with an allconsuming seraphic fire. The Seraphim are nearest to God, who sits above the Thrones of judgment; He, in turn, hovers over the Cherubim of contemplation, “for the Spirit of the Lord is borne upon the waters . . . above the heavens.”147 Both judgment and love mandate knowledge;

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thus, “the Cherub with its light both prepares us for the Seraphic fire and also enlightens us for the judgment of Thrones.”148 Making an imaginative leap, Pico allies the Cherubim with Pallas, goddess of wisdom, for the Cherub is the “guardian of contemplative philosophy,” and he is the angel whom humankind would do best to follow. The Cherubim facilitate our movement up or down from the stage of contemplation.149 Our ultimate ambition, however, should be to unite with the Seraphim and thereby merge with the divine: “One who is a Seraph – a lover – is in God, and God is in him; or rather, he and God are one.”150 In the longest section of his Oration, Pico outlines the calibrated educative system discovered in the ways of the Cherubim and illuminated by the “ancient fathers,” including Paul, Jacob, Job, Moses, Pythagoras, and the Chaldeans.151 Asking, in his Oration, what it was that Paul “saw the Cherubim doing when he was raised to the third heaven,” Pico finds out, from Dionysius, “that they are cleansed, then enlightened and finally perfected.”152 Paul and Dionysius teach a mystical perfection; Dionysius did this from a triadic perspective, through purgation (katharsis), illumination (photismos), and perfection (teleiosis). For Pico, as for his predecessors, Dionysius’s schema were indelibly linked not only to the angels, but also to a practice of mysticism that promised a complete cleansing and annihilation of the self in a union with God. Dionysius advocated motion inward as well as upward to a divine “darkness of unknowing”; the ideal was to be rather than to know, even though the actions of “gazing, contemplating, perceiving, or learning” (or epopteia) are at the pinnacle of the mystic’s process, a process that is open only to the initiated.153 In a pioneering move, Pico tied his biblical exemplars, the patriarchs, Jacob, Job, and Moses, not only to other wise men among the Gentiles, but also to the Kabbalists. Jacob’s ladder served as a powerful centerpiece in Pico’s ruminations: Let us consult the patriarch Jacob, whose gleaming image is carved in the seat of glory. As he sleeps in the lower world and watches in the world above, the wisest of fathers will advise us. He will use a figure (everything used to depend on them) to give us his advice: that there is a ladder reaching from earth below to the sky above, marked off in a series of many steps, with the Lord seated at the top. Up and down the ladder angels of contemplation move back and forth. But if we are to do the same as we aspire to the angelic life, who (I ask) will touch the

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Lord’s ladder with dirty feet or hands unclean? If the impure touches the pure, it is sacrilege, as the mysteries teach. What are these feet and hands, then? The foot of the soul, surely, is that worthless part that relies on matter as on the dirt of the ground, a nutritive and feeding power, I mean – tinder for lust and mistress of voluptuary softness. As for the hands of the soul, why not call them the wrathful part that battles to defend the appetites, plundering in heat and dust to snatch something to gorge on while snoozing in the shade? These hands, these feet – the whole sensual part where, so they say, the lure of the body hangs like a noose round the neck of the soul – let us wash them in the living waters of moral philosophy lest we be turned away, desecrated and defiled, from the ladder. But if we want to join the angels speeding up and down Jacob’s ladder, this washing will not be enough unless we have first been instructed and well prepared to advance from stage to stage as the rites require, never leaving the way of the ladder nor rushing off two ways at once. After we have completed this preparation through the art of speaking or reasoning, then, animated by the Cherubic spirit, philosophizing through the rungs of the ladder (or nature), passing from center to center through all things, at one moment we will be descending, using a titanic power to tear the one – like Osiris – into many, while at another moment we will be ascending, using the power of Phoebus to gather the many – like the limbs of Osiris – into one, until at last, resting at the top of the ladder in the bosom of the Father, we shall be perfected in theological bliss.154

Pico here vividly fused the mystical figure of the ladder, used by the Neoplatonic thinkers whom Dionysius himself had followed, with the figure of Jacob’s ladder from Scripture. To these motifs, he added elements from the Kabbalah.155 Like Jacob, we must put aside the lower world and awaken to a higher destiny, first in purifying our hands and feet. When Jacob awoke, he cried that he had seen the house of God and the gate of heaven. Pico knew this from Genesis but he also knew it from a thirteenth-century Kabbalistic work by Joseph Gikatilla entitled Gates of Justice. In this account, as well as in the same author’s better-known Gates of Light, Jacob is distinctive among the patriarchs for the degree to which he uncovers the mysteries of the Sefirot, the ten features of divinity comprising the larger structure of Kabbalistic theosophy.156 Gikatilla describes Adam’s muddied world, the world which, through refinement, Adam’s heirs will escape, and he mentions the seventy ministers who plague Adam’s descendents. In the complex geographies of the

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Sefirot of the Kabbalah, these “ministers” are “constellations” in the heavens and “nations” on earth who trouble Israel; yet their influence weakens in the generations following Adam, the generations of Seth, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Abraham, and Isaac.157 Abraham and Isaac are still under the sway of the ministers, owing to their impurities, and they “face” them on the right and left in the author’s schema. Jacob, however, “is pure and without refuse . . . in the middle between Abraham and Isaac.”158 More than this, Gikatilla links the patriarchs not only to these geographies or directions, but also to qualities. Abraham, at the right, belongs with the fourth Sefirah (Love, Compassion, or Greatness), while Isaac, on the left, connects to the fifth Sefirah (Justice, Fear, or Power). Jacob, in the middle, partners with the sixth Sefirah (Beauty, Truth, or Knowledge). In his dream, Jacob hears a potent message from God that his seed will “burst forth” in every direction; in the mystical context, as Beauty, he is “the only one that ascends . . . to reach Keter (Crown),” while Isaac (Justice) and Abraham (Love) are pinned below by the seventy ministers.159 With his two forbears, Jacob might also comprise “a throne for the divine constellation” such that the middle triad of the Sefirot is a foundation for the highest triad. The patriarchs might alternatively be conceived not as legs for the throne but as “chariots” or chariot wheels. The ladder of Jacob becomes, in this allusive system, a middle line or “celestial pillar” governed by him and by which means the Shekinah (or Creator’s Presence) ascends. “On earth she [the Shekinah] dwells in the place where Jacob had his dream, called Beth El or the House of God.”160 In noting that the image of Jacob is “carved in the seat of glory,” Pico uses a Kabbalistic metaphor for the Sefirotic emanation of divinity, as well as the patriarch’s honored place with the Sefirot. The wisdom of the Kabbalah led Pico to place Jacob at the head of the patriarchs who are guides to the cherubic way: “Since Pico’s goal was to climb ‘to the top of the ladder in the bosom of the Father,’ the direct route from Jacob’s central place to the Sefirotic summit – where a Cherub rides the chariot – was an attractive path.”161 As he plotted this path, Pico may also have consulted the early Kabbalistic tract, the Bahir, in addition to the Zohar.162 He may, too, have been reading Latin translations of other writings, as well as engaging Jewish mystics such as Yohanan Alemanno, who believed, like Pico, in mystical ascent and union. Unlike Pico, however, Alemanno subscribed to a concept of wholesale and universal redemption, rather

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than redemption on an individual basis. Alemanno thought of mind, soul, and matter in two ways: on the one hand, as a structure of concentric spheres and, on the other, of the soul and nature as a ladder that humans and angels traversed between matter and the mind.163 Pico refers to Alemanno’s two circles and a straight line in the Oration when he mentions “philosophizing through the rungs of the ladder (or nature) [and] passing from center to center through all things, at one moment . . . descending . . . at another . . . ascending.”164 For Pico’s readers, however, these elusive references would have been opaque, as he seems to have intended. He indicates his own deliberate obfuscation at the end, thereby lending himself and his work an aura of the hidden mysteries and a hint of the romance of fascinating secrets withheld: “To disclose . . . the more secret mysteries, the arcana of supreme divinity,” would be “to give the sacrament to dogs and to cast pearls before swine. Hence it was a matter of divine command, not human judgment, to keep secret from the populace what must be told to the perfect.”165 Pico’s synthesis of an eclectic range of sources should not distract us from his adventurous adaptation of the Cherubim and their biblical, exegetical, and Kabbalistic accretions to the purpose and goals of philosophy itself. Clearly, in his testimony on behalf of philosophy and theology together, and in his passionate, if not polemical justification of his own choice to be a philosopher, he astutely chose a long-standing, resilient, versatile, and authoritative motif: the angel and the angel in his highest form, as wisdom and contemplation. From this beginning in the Oration, Pico turns to the matter of philosophy itself and to its many eclectic sources, including magic and the Kabbalah. The program that he outlines in the second half of the Oration is even more fully developed in his Conclusiones.166 Drawing on early writers such as Plotinus, Pico also explores in the shorter, preparatory piece notions of “natural” and “demonic” magic, fusing these with Christian rubrics relative to grace and virtue.167 Natural magic may energize humankind to “that wonderment of God’s works of which faith, hope and a ready love are sure and certain effects,” so that the three theological virtues are attainable. “By a constant contemplation of God’s wonders,” he says, we will be directed to such a deep love that “we cannot hold back the song, ‘Full are the heavens, full is the whole earth with the greatness of your glory.’”168 This “song” is the Seraphim’s music, which comprises part of the threefold

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blessing sung by the angels in Isaiah. Good magic, that is, natural magic, impels us upward toward the highest angels and to fiery immolation in love. The books of the Kabbalists confirm this trajectory.169 Pico was not the first to refer to magic and hidden knowledge, and he was also not alone in promulgating “natural magic,” for Ficino, Johannes Trithemius, and Cornelius Agrippa would join him.170 The German humanist, Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), energetically recommended study of the Kabbalah in his De arte cabbalistica (1517), suggesting, albeit in a different fashion from Pico, how the philosopher-Kabbalist might transcend himself: “while he still lodges in human skin, he becomes a companion of angels and, like them, a tenant of a dwelling-place above the heavens.” His conversing with these creatures allows him slowly to make his way “towards higher things,” achieving “remarkable things which common folk call ‘miracles.’”171 Among the likely influences on Pico with respect to the Kabbalah were the Latin writings of Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, a thirteenth-century mystic. Abulafia dwelt on the angels in his prescriptions on names and meditation, as well as for achieving ecstatic and prophetic abandonment of the world. He intended in his Kabbalah “that human beings shall turn into separate angels” by striving for that state of ecstasy, to “be saved by this from natural death on the day of [their] . . . death and live forever.”172 In reading these sentiments, Pico would have found confirmation for Neoplatonic precepts about the soul’s aspirations to forsake the body.173 But Pico goes further, especially in his somewhat deliberately impenetrable Conclusiones, for he uses the Kabbalah, and the angels, in particular, as instructive lessons in what not to do. If the scholar “goes wrong in the work or comes to it unpurified, he will be devoured by Azazel”; demons linger where angels sing. The good angel, Metatron, is drawn by a positive theurgy to do battle with the fallen angels, even Samael, who is Satan’s equivalent in the Kabbalah.174 Practical Kabbalah operates as magic against the powers of the demonic; for Abulafia, this magic worked through the names, through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Even in his Oration, however, Pico referred elliptically to the Kabbalah when he treated human person’s kinship with the chameleon, for he noted that “the Hebrews with their more secret theology sometimes transform the blessed Enoch into an angel of divinity, which they call malach haShekinah, and sometimes they change others into other divine powers.” Toward the

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end of the work, he identifies this “secret theology” as Kabbalah, and malach haShekinah means “the angel of God’s presence;” in other words, the absolute pinnacle of humankind’s desired ascent.175 It was on the very question of angels that Pico’s controversial definition of the purifying practices and goals of philosophy depended. The Church would proscribe his conclusion that magic and the Kabbalah provided knowledge of Christ’s divinity, even as he tried to make clear his distinction between these and demonic magic. With Ficino, he sought to combine the wisdom of the ancients with that of the occult; Azazel and Metatron were not symbolic forms for him but real and potent. Steering close to Origen, he paid heed to the idea not only of the descent of the spirits from heaven and of humans becoming angels but also of the potential that divinity itself might be redefined.176 Magic was required in order to call upon Metatron, whom Abulafia had described as a prince, and an “agent intellect”: What takes our intellect from potency to act is an intellect separated from all matter and called by many different names in our language. . . . For it is called hu saro sel aholam or ‘he is the prince of the world’ and it is ‘Mattatron prince of the faces,’ in Hebrew . . . mattatron sar appanim. . . . And his real name is just like the name of his master, which is sadai. . . . And the wise . . . call him . . . sechel appoel or ‘agent intellect’ . . . and he has many other names besides, . . . and he rules over the hierarchy of angels called hisim. . . . Therefore the intellect or intelligence in our language is called . . . malach or ‘angel’ or cherub. . . . Therefore our wise men often call him . . . Henoch, and they say that Henoch is Mattatron.177

Like his scholastic colleagues in the Middle Ages, Abulafia shares what they would have called an Aristotelian sympathy, especially in his notion of the “agent intellect,” which, for them, designated an element of the human mind.178 For a few heterodox Muslim and Jewish thinkers, by contrast, the agent intellect was located among ten emanations of the One, not in the human person but in the macrocosm to which the human person appealed. For Abulafia, the agent intellect was Metatron.179 And he goes further: the agent intellect is also the Mashiyah, or the Anointed; by way of “angelic ecstasy, the Messianic mystic becomes a savior.”180 In this vein, Metatron seems to have been both a being and a salvific type. The mystic will sense that “his entire body . . . has been anointed with the oil

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of anointing, . . . and he will be called ‘the angel of the Lord [mal’akh ha-‘elohim].’”181 Outlining the numerological resonances of the angel’s name with other sacred names, such as the Shaddai (a name for God in the Hebrew Bible), Abulafia mapped a [an] audacious spiritual trajectory. For the author, too, and for Pico, Metatron possessed other names, including “ruuah accodex or ‘Holy Spirit’ and . . . xechina, which means ‘divinity’ or ‘dweller’.”182 That the Presence of God, or Shekinah, serves as the lowest characteristic of the Creator and as the first encounter with creation is a given in Kabbalah, but it was a revelation for Pico and obscure to his Christian readers. Enoch’s transformation into the angel of the Shekinah or Metatron was not common knowledge among Christians although it was received wisdom in medieval Judaism.183 For Pico, humankind’s angelic capability was a double-edged sword since the portrait of Metatron led inevitably along the road to the demonic arts even as it sanctioned his “angelic theurgy.” “That Enoch becomes Metatron, that practical Cabala turns humans into angels, is astounding enough. Beyond astonishment is Metatron’s appearance as Shaddai, Messiah, and Shekinah, an angelic appropriation of the Trinity.”184 On the other hand, Pico also voiced in his Oration a strand of Jewish mysticism that was congenial with Christian precepts. In general, for Pico as for many of his contemporaries and later readers, the occult (meaning “hidden”) powers of the Kabbalah, combined with Neoplatonism, could potentially transcend confessional divides. The German Benedictine, Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), his pupil, the theologian, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), and the Dominican, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), were Catholics, while John Dee (1527–c. 1608), the noted hermeticist, philosopher, and astrologer at the court of Elizabeth I, and Richard Napier were both English Protestants. Trithemius, a magician who campaigned against witchcraft, believed that he had a mothering spirit as a companion. He conjured the dead, possessed an indelible knowledge of the past as well as the future, and, around 1500, authored a book on angel magic and cryptology, the Steganographia, which was published only in 1606 and 1635.185 For his part, Dee’s famous conversations with angels, who included Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, Uriel, and others, were intended essentially to construct a Jacob’s ladder leading to the next world.186 Dee, whose intriguing investigations are a worthy study in their own right, is as much a follower of medieval theorists of angelic language and

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interlocutors of angels, such as Umiltà of Faenza, as he is of later figures such as Ficino.187 For all of these writers, in fact, it was language that was the key by which to call forth and give character to the angels. Using an obsidian show stone (or crystal ball), Dee also received words in dictation from the angels, sometimes in Enochian language. His views were serious enough to merit papal condemnation; he was also, however, a scientist in the modern sense. If we take the long view of angels’ history, Dee’s is a case study in the natural scientific pursuit of angels as a means to deciphering the puzzles of the cosmos, including the enigma of human vulnerability. He also saw angels’ potential to unite confessional differences. His follower, the physician, Napier, held interviews with Archangel Raphael, who predicted both devastating plague and the promotion of local bishops. True to his nature, Raphael also consulted on diagnosing maladies and proposing cures.188 For these and other Early Modern practitioners, the demonic realm – and accusations of necromancy – could be just around the corner. And although these scholars belonged to an elite cadre of intellectuals and angelologists, by the mid-seventeenth century, especially in England and northern Europe, angelic magic and its conjurors were widespread across social classes as important texts issued from printing presses, supplementing local, popular beliefs in fairies.189 Pico was a pioneer. In advocating the ideal path to self-forgetting, fulfilment, and redemption, the Renaissance philosopher brought together the mystic’s use of God’s secret names with the Cherubic way. The secrecy of Kabbalah was like that of the Egyptian sphinxes, and the silence of Pythagoras and Plato; these secrets prove the wisdom of the Jews who are so reverent to Kabbalah that, as the twentysomething Pico advanced, “they permit no one below the age of forty to touch them.”190 efh

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A pictorial tradition in Arezzo, beginning with the artists, Spinello Aretino and Parri Spinelli, showed God himself giving instructions to Gabriel who then, grasping the palm of victory, alights before the Virgin.192 Piero della Francesca follows in this local convention in his fresco of the Annunciation for the True Cross cycle in San Francesco, Arezzo (see Fig. 24), although he departs from all precedent in including this subject within a True Cross narrative.193 Part of the explanation for the work’s placement lies in another local ritual, namely, the recitation of the Franciscan, Beato Benedetto Sinigardi’s antiphon, Angelus locutus est Mariae, composed in the thirteenth century. The Franciscans of the convent recited or perhaps sang the antiphon after compline, beginning with the phrase “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.”194 Traditionally, they inserted a Hail Mary between each verse and response. Piero’s fresco is visible from the friars’ choir, and it unites, then, a local brotherly devotion, written by the chapter’s founder, with Franciscan veneration of Mary. Further, Gabriel is the agent in this sensory drama, an explication of the redemptive schema on display around the cappella maggiore. Not far away is the altar of the Conception, which also testifies to the sacrality of the sanctuary.195 Offering a meditative pause before the cycle concludes with the return of the True Cross relic to Jerusalem, Gabriel is a pivot in the salvational momentum of the episodes. Piero’s angels exhibit a cosmopolitan, even secularized aspect, much of which has to do with the idiosyncracies of his formal expression, which is powerfully informed by a generous enthusiasm for classical style and the potential of perspective, especially geometry, to operate as a sacred language in its own right. On the other side of the high altar from the Annunciation, and as a meaningful partner to Gabriel, a radically foreshortened angel, his wings burning with otherworldly light, descends to Constantine to deliver the hopeful message of the sleeping emperor’s dream (Fig. 37). From the beginning, with the Death of Adam, where a standing angel in white, in the background, gravely confers with the aged patriarch, to these two dignified beings below, we have an indication of Piero’s original outlook. Like the solidly modeled grouping of angels at the left in The Baptism of Christ (1448–1450), or the four bejeweled attendants in the Montefeltro Altarpiece (1472–1474), their wings barely visible, Piero’s angels share the mortal realm as if they, too, breathe and carry

Jacob’s Ladder

37. Piero della Francesca, The Dream of Constantine (fresco) (1452–1566), San Francesco, Arezzo (Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY)

bodily weight.196 These qualities are even more apparent in his St. Michael (c. 1470) for the polyptych for St. Augustine where the wings seem to be appended as an afterthought to the theatrical armor of the triumphant Archangel.197 Active in the era of the Church councils and moving within the erudite circles not only of the princely courts, but also of humanists, philologists, and theologians, Piero and his works speak to reason and to the judgment of nature. He adapted the forms and attributes of his angels to a climate of reform generated by the tensions between Eastern and Western orthodoxies, and he is, in this light, among the first artists to

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respond to the ecumenical capacities of angels. The angel sometimes identified as St. Michael at the back in the Brera altarpiece has green wings, which is, in itself, an unusual choice. Apart from their lively coloristic presence in the composition, these wings may reflect the emerald feathers, saffron hairs, and myriad faces of the Archangel in Muslim lore. St. Michael, as we have seen, is a saint with a distinctly Eastern resume.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONTEMPLATION: ANGELIC WITNESS AND EMPATHY

In the Cinquecento, as artists and their patrons responded to the heterogeneous character of doctrinal and institutional reforms in the era leading up to the Council of Trent (1545–1563), angels were put to new purposes. The curiosity and experimentalism of late fifteenthcentury thinkers such as Pico gave way to skepticism about angels on the part of many humanist scholars, including the Augustinian reformer, Martin Luther (1483–1546). These volatile currents paved the way, after Trent, for a robust revival and reinvention of scholastic classifications of angels. As their theological natures were redrawn, so, too, were their many functions in visual culture. At the same time, with an historicism and self-consciousness that marks artistic practice in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, artists drew upon the vocabulary and inflections of earlier iconographies. The functions of angels might now range from their roles as supporting players in controversial sacramental contexts to their appearances as votive emblems in the household: from seraphic conduits of love, conceived in secular, philosophical, and poetic terms, to comedic conspirators, like the putto, who seem to deride the mysteries of their nature that they are supposed to uphold. In these ways, angels in the Cinquecento begin to assume bodies that are often more like those of their human companions, and their identifying angelic features can be less conspicuous. On the other hand, their angelic attributes can also be so ostentatious as to invite a knowing nod on the part of their observers who recognize at once both angels’ departures from text and their special participation in works of art. The

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question of the painted angel as sign for something beyond and outside itself can be compared to the question of the function of the image as a sign and, in the Cinquecento, the angel as imago assumes an ever more sophisticated disposition.

The Bread of Angels While in Rome in the 1520s, Rosso Fiorentino painted a Dead Christ with Angels for his friend and countryman, Leonardo Tornabuoni, Bishop of Sansepolcro (Plate XXV).1 Within a compressed and darkened space, four youthful, extravagantly dressed figures encircle Christ. Two of these stand behind the sarcophagus on which he is seated, clasping large candles; like him, they are brightly lit. We see two partially hidden youths behind these, their faces turned to the right, like Christ’s, framing his head and shoulders. One of these, from behind, places his hand delicately onto Christ’s wound. The five figures are gathered in intimate communion so that the heightened contrasts of light and dark, of soft flesh and spicy color, undressed and dressed are made all the more intense. The contrast, too, between the young men’s tumbling, classical ringlets and ornate tunics – green, blue to yellow, and pink, blue to green – with the older figure’s naked physique is all the more provocative in terms of the theological truths and contradictions that these formal elements express. These youths might pass for human persons until we notice the partly concealed wings at the front, at left and right. Their apparently human, sensate engagement is all the more striking for their juxtaposition with the introversion and pale, passive body of Christ: in the tactile wrinkling of their clothes, in their veins, twisting muscles, and knowing, empathetic glances. Rosso gave such worldly features to his human actors, for he painted a similarly golden-haired young man, in an outfit of orange and green, in his Pietà a decade later, underscoring the interchangeable physicality of his protagonists and, not least, his debt to Michelangelo and his classicist spirit.2 In giving his angels such corporeality, however, Rosso also pays clever homage to the theology of angels. He acknowledges, first, that they are creatures of extraterrestrial beauty by using a kind of cangiantismo in their clothing; this, together with Christ’s body, is set on fire by light. This effect is a mark of angels’ ethereal otherworldliness, and it connects Rosso to a long tradition going back to the

The Bread of Angels

fourteenth century of the shot silk color shift as a symbol of the divine. Second, the artist suggests, perhaps, and by way of those glances, the supra-verbal intellection of angels. A traditional Man of Sorrows might have pointed to his wound, or else the Virgin might have supported the sacred body, presenting it squarely to the viewer. Here, it is the angels who take on those tasks, as allusions perhaps to the long-held notion of the divine body as the bread of angels.3 The image of the dead Christ accompanied by angels was, of course, familiar to Renaissance observers and so, too, was the suggestion that his body pulsed with a semblance of life.4 The radical nature of Rosso’s angels, and as a counterpoint to Christ, has been overlooked, however, in favor of an emphasis on the imago pietatis as a virtuosic, multivalent, and visually rapturous essay in sacramental symbolism.5 As others have recognized, the artist portrayed Christ’s body as a paradoxical sign both of his death and of his conquest of it, his transcendence of corporeality itself. He also responded to contemporary Roman theological controversies in light of reform critiques from the North.6 The altarpiece, which is portable in size, may have been destined for his friend’s bishopric in Sansepolcro, but it remained in Rome, and here it would likely have been viewed within a private setting.7 In such a focused context, the panel’s beholders might well have reflected on the relationship between the languid body and the Eucharist. More than this, the panel is both representation and symbolic sign, with a function similar to the sacramental bread and available to the same theological speculation. Both the bread and altarpiece are indices of the eternal salvation assured by Christ’s sacrifice; this is so whether we believe we apprehend in the panel and in the bread a symbolized body, or understand them both to be manifesting flesh and blood, at once both static and in transit between death and new life. Rosso’s angels, as paradoxical nonbodily bodily beings, invite attention and admiration, as well. For as churchmen on both sides of the Alps turned to Scripture as the definitive source in shaping a reformed Church, the existence and character of angels also came to be treated with caution by reformers. Angels, like the Eucharistic wafer, pose an ontological question as to being and nonbeing, signified and real presence. Luther himself never dismissed “apparitions” of angels out of hand, but he believed the angels truly to work in secret. In the same way, he never rejected outright the doctrine of real presence in the Eucharist.8 He

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did become increasingly strict in his views, to the point that he emphasized in his Lectures on Genesis, beginning in 1535, that he had often prayed at the beginning of his ministry that he would not receive “visions, dreams or angels.”9 At one level, then, Rosso’s Dead Christ offers a meditation on divine presence with respect to symbols and bodies. The artist ideates one body, Christ’s, that is strictly both divine and mortal, but he emphasizes not only that body’s carnality but also its liminal state between life and death. Around Christ, he paints four beings who belie their defining essence as invisible, bodiless substance through their quickening sensual beauty and tender, psychological engagement. In these ways, they seem more human than Christ himself. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the key subject of the painting, and Christ and the angels act in tandem to express that central mystery of the Catholic faith. But for Luther, as for his forbears and contemporaries, the question of what was represented by the bread at Mass was at issue. Was the sacramental bread a sign so that the difference between the bread and Christ’s body belonged wholly to symbolic meaning? Or was the communion bread instead the body itself, wholly transubstantiated during the Mass and therefore as much a mystery of faith as the very death it reenacted?10 In answer to the metaphorical interpretation of Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, who saw in the real presence argument a cannibalistic reading of Scripture (“Hoc est enim corpus meum” [Matthew 26: 26; Mark 14: 22; Luke 22: 19]), the Dominican, Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, who was a scholar of Aquinas, argued for a literal meaning of “is” and “is present”: What words ought the Apostle to have used for signifying the true body of Christ, if these do not suffice? If these words of Christ and of Paul are not enough for teaching that the true body of Christ is present [“verum Christi corpus esse”] in the sacrament of the eucharist, tell me, I beg you, what words were to be used in order to express the fact that the true body of Christ was present in this sacrament? . . . if these words do not suffice . . . no word suffices.11

For an Aristotelian like Cajetan, for whom distinctions between essences and substances were useful, there was a middle way for, as he proposed, Christ’s body was present in the sacrament yet not in corporeal fashion. “No one,” he said:

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is so mad as to say that spirit is body; but we say that the body of Christ has a spiritual mode of being in this sacrament. It is indeed present as a true body in the sacrament, but it does not exist in the mode of a body . . . for it does not exist occupying space, but it exists spiritually, in a mode incomprehensible to the human intellect, just as the mode of the union of the word of God to its assumed humanity is incomprehensible.12

In this scholastic spirit, the problem of physical bodies being manifest in nonphysical ways was a serious one. One solution with respect to the body of Christ was that his body could be present and yet occupy no position available to human explanation. That discussants in this debate reasoned in this way would not surprise anyone trained in angelology who was familiar with classifications of angelic nature going back at least as far as Aquinas and beyond. Indeed, anyone who had studied the Summa, as certainly Cajetan had, possessed a capacity for just this kind of elegant conclusion. Angels themselves pose their own particular challenge since they cannot be fully equated with Christ nor correlated with the question of his noncorporeal presence. If “the places on the continuum of noncorporeal presence came to be marked by all kinds of floating visions attracted to the noncorporeal and invisible presence of Christ inhering in the host,” including bleeding visions, still, this was not the same kind of presence as that of the angels.13 Although the angels choose on occasion to appear as visions, they are not visions, for they inhere to noncorporeality as a state of being. They can choose, in other words, and according to divine directive, to appear as anything, including visions of anything. Yet for those who debated the idea that visions pertaining to Christ’s bleeding body were legitimate “alternative noncorporeal bodies of Christ,” their habits of deduction were likely lent a capacity of imagination and acuity by the teachings of angelology.14 Aquinas himself treated visions of Christ in the Summa, and concluded that they were divine representations intended to focus the mind on the flesh and blood invisibly present.15 From the early thirteenth century onward, the notion of the Mass as sacrifice had been explicated by way of a theory of art, and it was Aquinas who had made this theory canonical: The celebration of this sacrament is said to be the sacrifice of Christ for two reasons. The first is that, as Augustine says to Simplicianus, ‘pictures [imagines] are usually called by the names of the things whose

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pictures they are; just as when, looking at a panel or a painted wall, we say “That is Cicero. That is Sallustius”.’ As has been said above, however, the celebration of the sacrament is a kind of representative image . . . of the passion of Christ, which is the true sacrifice . . .; the other reason is as to the effect of the passion: that is to say, through this sacrament we are made sharers of the fruits of the Passion of the Lord.16

In Reformation era disputes over the Mass as sacrifice, ritual, memorial, or replication, the very issue of painting came into play.17 In 1526, the German professor of theology, Johannes Eck, defended the Mass by establishing a hierarchy of representation, with memorial and painting at the lowest, most inferior levels of demonstration. Eck stressed both actions, such as gestures and word, and effects.18 Aware of the disputed objects and rituals with which his altarpiece was functionally bound, Rosso’s solution was a work that, in its display of the holy body of the Man of Sorrows, adapted memory and artifact to new purposes. In the interplay between vigorous youth and pallid, vulnerable divinity, he further “closed the gap between sign and thing signified, characteristic of the replication theory, to make a mystery.”19 The angels, who had long played a role in the tradition of the Man of Sorrows, act by reason of their aliveness to ascertain that mystery. In the Quattrocento, Fra Angelico had quite literally elided the image of the Man of Sorrows with the bread of the angels. In the predella of his Coronation (Louvre), in a panel to the right of the Man of Sorrows, angels distribute communion wafers to the assembled Dominican friars at their communal table.20 In c. 1485, Andrea Mantegna completed his arresting Man of Sorrows with a Seraph and a Cherub (Fig. 38) in which two angels, in their identifying colors of red and blue, kneel on a porphyry sarcophagus as they lament Christ’s death. The angels in both Mantegna’s and Rosso’s works portray moments extracted from time, reinforcing the equivocal nature of the body, which is dominant in size, tactile in its surfaces, and self-sufficient in its posture, as if it were alive. Mantegna’s Christ sits erect and extends his pierced hands. Rosso’s Christ revolves around the points of his toes. Both works are absent of agency and narrative.21 The angels in both paintings also recall the iconography of the Eucharist from a liturgical perspective, particularly the design of Renaissance tabernacles. In this vein, the angels may also have called to mind for their beholders the popular legend of one of Pope Gregory’s most controversial miracles.

The Bread of Angels

38. Andrea Mantegna, Man of Sorrows with a Seraph and Cherub (panel) (c. 1485–1490) (78.0 × 48 cm) (Photo credit: Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark)

While officiating at Mass, an image of the Man of Sorrows in front of Gregory came to life and bled before him.22 The image was accompanied by the instruments of the Passion. At some level, Rosso is quoting the Roman pope’s miracle. In his painting, we see the arma Christi: the crown of

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thorns (on Christ’s head), as well as three nails, the vinegar-soaked sponge, and possibly also the drapery remaining from his audience with Pilate.23 These attributes attach to venerable iconographic conventions associated with the Eucharist, as well as with the angels who are often shown carrying them. The angels and their attributes lead us, then, by way of slow scrutiny and careful discovery, to the over-riding meaning of the panel. Judging by the wisps of smoke issuing from the tips of their candles, which move, like the light, from the left to right, these have just been snuffed out. The drifting smoke indicates our entry into the space or, at least, the sudden opening of the enclosure. We witness, then, the moment at which, from within the confines of his tomb, Christ is stirring to life as the resurrected Savior. Rosso has taken the genre of the Engelpietà to its furthest proposition since the angels here do not support the body at all, but, rather, they stand beside it as it stirs, with a small smile, to life.24 efh

Although Rosso admired Michelangelo, his picturing of the dead Christ differs from Michelangelo’s design of the Pietà group for his friend, Vittoria Colonna, in which two young angels at either side grasp Christ’s arms at the elbows as he slumps down within the Virgin’s lap (Fig. 39).25 One angel turns inward and the other outward, settling Christ’s body to a point of stillness as she raises her arms in counterpoint to his. In the drawing, the angels act in their nature as divine agents whose unifying theological profile comprises love, conforming to Michelangelo’s poetic invocations of love and grace, and bearing a strong sympathy, as well, with the writings of both of the poets. Colonna herself meditated on the image of the Virgin supporting the dead Christ in her Pianto sopra la Passione di Cristo, which was likely written in the period from 1539 to 1542, at the same time as the artist’s drawings for her.26 Focusing on the Virgin’s mourning over the body of her son, Colonna describes those who could have witnessed it and offered their aid to her, and she summons the Apostles. The angels, she says, compensated for the Apostle’s absence at this juncture for they undertook to care for Christ’s body in their stead: “and if not for the angels who compensated for the ingratitude of man, those who could have been there but were not would feel great sorrow and regret.”27 The parallel between her poem and Michelangelo’s drawing has been noted. Both the artist and his

The Bread of Angels

39. Michelangelo, Pietà (chalk) (c. 1538) (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) (Photo credit: © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library)

correspondent seem to have been drawing upon the traditions of the Engelpietà and of the angels as vehicles of comfort. The Virgin expresses her gratitude to the angels “who were there to make up for the absence of man.”28 They “wished to assume the human weight.” At the end, Colonna ponders the absence of Christ’s soul – which is, in itself, a strange

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preoccupation for her to have – and the duty incumbent on his mother to be its custodian before God: Thus the Madonna, seeing the absence of the holy soul of Christ, which alone was sufficient to honor the immense grandeur of divinity, saw that it was up to her to supply such a great debt, and would have wanted to liquefy herself, consume herself to the very limit in the fire of love and in the tears of compassion in order to rid the world and herself of such ingratitude, and to render to God the obsequy and the cult that were due him.29

Without determining a literal or single intention on Colonna’s part, it is tempting to see an affective resonance between her “fuoco del’amore” and even her “lacrime de la compassione” and the angels at the Virgin’s side. As the highest order of angels, composed exclusively of the fires of divine love, the Seraphim might well be allusively encompassed within the ripples of her ardent outburst of feeling. The Seraphim are the Virgin’s most frequent companions among the angels, and, more generally, their kind oftentimes acts as a subjective register for the human drama they behold. That Michelangelo’s angels are wingless has the effect of universalizing still further an event that is outside scriptural time and place, focusing attention on the message of salvation delivered through a very human body that is sinking from the lap of love toward the tomb. Michelangelo’s simultaneous intimation of birth in his arrangement of the son and mother also reinforces the effect of this action taking place outside time, an action that will, in the end, ensure a second birth. Descendents of the Seraphim of divine love, although strayed from their original home among the Dionysian hierarchies, appear in later devotional imagery. In Boëtius à Bolswert’s Divine Love Covering the Eyes of the Soul to Protect Her From Temptation, for example, which was published in the Jesuit, Hermann Hugo’s much-circulated Pia Desideria (1624), an amor divinus places his hands over the soul’s eyes so that she cannot see the worldly woman behind them; she is holding a fan and a shell for blowing bubbles (Fig. 40).30 The soul’s obscured eyes are prominent in the left foreground as a directive to the beholder who is, by implication, encouraged to spurn earthly seductions and turn within. The amor divinus, with his wings, is evidently angelic in type and he draws on the traditions of angelic iconography, yet he is rather more a personification,

The Bread of Angels

40. Boëtius à Bolswert, Divine Love Covering the Eyes of the Soul to Protect Her From Temptation (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) (Photo credit: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ [see emblems.let.uu.nl/hu1624.html])

an allegorical abstraction, as is the soul, as well, who, in other Early Modern renderings, also has wings.31 Even more relevant to Colonna’s imagery is Bolswert’s emblem in the same work of Anima Dissolving Under the Fiery Breath of Divine Love, for here, the amor divinus literally blows upon the soul whose body liquefies as she gazes rapt upon him (Fig. 41).32 With his outburst of light and cherubic body, this spirit recommends the union of soul and angel in contemplative ascent, and this has always been at the heart of angelic spirituality. efh

The moments of the Passion commemorated in many works of art through the first half of the sixteenth century – Depositions, Lamentations, Pietàs, and Entombments – indicate a shift in religious sensibilities and taste.33 This shift accompanied the complex and heterogeneous climate of reform that swept the institutional Church and lay and religious communities up to and through Trent. The image of the body of Christ called to mind by Catholic reformers through these decades embodies their ambitions to restore to the Church a transformative and sacramental religious culture. Rosso’s Dead Christ lies at the heart of this

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41. Boëtius à Bolswert, Anima Dissolving Under the Fiery Breath of Divine Love (print) (from Hermann Hugo, Pia Desiderata, 1624) (Photo credit: creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-sa/1.0/ [see emblems.let.uu.nl/hu1624.html])

culture because of his revolutionary and multivalent treatment of his subject and, not least, because his patron was a member of the new Theatine Order formed in June 1524 by four members of the Roman Oratory of Divine Love.34 That the painting was labeled in its day as showing Christ “in forma Pietatis” directs our attention to Christ’s body as both aesthetic focus and spiritual mystery; it was a subject, as well, that Rosso turned to often, both before and after his visit to Rome.35 He himself appears to have referred to the finished panel as a Pietà that showed Christ surrounded by angels; this implicates a Man of Sorrows iconography.36 For an earlier predella on which he had collaborated with Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso painted “un Christo morto con due angioletti che gli fanno lume con due torce, e lo piangone.”37 This predella was destined for Andrea del Sarto’s Annunciation (c. 1512–1513), made, according to Giorgio Vasari, for Taddeo Castiglione’s Chapel of the Annunciation. Vasari learned this by way of Agnolo Bronzino, who had been Pontormo’s pupil.38 In the conjunction of the Annunciation with the death of Christ, there is an angelic teleology at work, for just as Gabriel sounds a beginning, the mourning angels with their lit torches bring us to the tragedy at the end, moments both of stillness and anticipation.

The Bread of Angels

42. Agostino Veneziano, Pietà (engraving) (after Andrea del Sarto, Puccini Pietà [1516]) (28.8 × 21.9 cm) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949 [49.97.13]) (Photo credit: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY)

Andrea del Sarto had composed his own earlier Pietà differently from Rosso’s in an astonishing essay on the theme in a lost painting known only from Agostino Veneziano’s engraving of 1516 (Fig. 42). His Christ is also located on a cloth at the center, leaning back and to the right from a seated position, and flanked by three large angels. The angels possess three distinct tasks in laying out the sacred body, holding the nails and, at left, nursing Christ’s heavy arm; in this, they combine variant types of the Engelpietà.39 Most striking, however, is the dominant central angel with his full and open wings into whose lap Christ falls back. His wing tips rise

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above the hill of Golgotha, forming an inverse triangle to the pyramidal form of the lower half of the picture; the apex of each triangle meets at Christ’s foreshortened and upturned face on which this angel solemnly gazes. For Rosso, Sarto’s painting, the Puccini Pietà (1515–1516), was an inspiration, both for his Dead Christ and for his subsequent Volterra Deposition, even though Sarto had chosen a landscape setting, by contrast, and a clear and comprehensible action.40 Where the emblems of the Passion in Sarto’s design are prominent, including the cross and ladder, the nails at right, and the crown of thorns in the foreground (beside Veneziano’s signature), Rosso renders them unobtrusive, overshadowing them with the absorptive view of the body itself. Rosso’s sepulchral penumbra, in which the passages of color from the blue of Christ’s drapery to the sharp dazzle of the angel’s attire, brings with it, too, an alternative reading of the material substrates of the panel itself, the panel as panel. Even allowing for the fact that we have only Veneziano’s engraving as a record, and even allowing for Rosso’s evident admiration for Sarto’s colorism, the differences in the compositions urge very different interpretations.41 Where Rosso’s work avoids narrative specificity, the other sets the stage; where one engages intimate, individual scrutiny, the other suggests a more panoramic, inclusive view. Perhaps Rosso saw in angels a particularly promising source of innovation, an outlet, then, for his self-acknowledged arrogance, and an opportunity to compete with his peers on a traditional theme. His Florentine fresco of the Assumption (1513–1514) (Fig. 43), for the Servites of SS. Annunziata, disappointed his patrons; one reason may have been that they perceived an awkwardness in the composition in which the massive Apostles occupy most of the lower section, obscuring the Virgin’s tomb. Another reason may have been Rosso’s inadequate technique.42 He seems to have wanted to outshine his colleagues almost to the point of perverseness. In this light, the circling rings of angels in two heavenly rims governed by a high and golden cloudy oculus remind us of Botticini’s rare solution for the same subject of the Assumption (see Plate VI). That Florentine work also met with controversy. In both cases, the Virgin rises in the company of musical angels, and the spheres open out above and behind the upper frame. Beneath a golden wreath of cherubic, cloudy, smiling faces, Rosso portrayed a second ring of putti, a number with red and blue wings,

The Bread of Angels

43. Rosso Fiorentino, Assumption (fresco) (1513–1514) (360 × 305 cm), SS. Annunziata, Florence (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

who hold hands as they rotate in a brilliant rephrasing of the choral dance. This angelic chain, comprising the lower dome of the spheres, especially impressed Vasari, who used it in his own Assumption and Coronation commissions; it also led the sculptors, Baccio Bandinelli and Benvenuto Cellini, to borrow from it.43 From these grinning mischiefmakers, it seems but a small step to Rosso’s conspiring, ruddy-cheeked pair at the feet of the Virgin and Child in his altarpiece for the funerary chapel of Francesca Ripoi in the Florentine church of Ognissanti (Fig. 44)44 The artist was contracted for the project in 1518 by Ripoi’s

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44. Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbott, Stephen, and Jerome (originally in Ognissanti) (oil on panel) (1518) (172 × 141.5 cm) (Uffizi) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

executor, Leonardo Buonafé, the director of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, but this assignment, too, was not well received.45 Buonafé’s reaction probably had less to do with the angels, however, than with the uncompromising rendition of the saints who appeared to the patron, according to Vasari, like “devils.”46 Among those four saints are St. John the Baptist, who points toward the winged pair below, and St. Jerome, who curls the fingers of his right hand over them, possibly in blessing. The two saints’ attitudes are puzzling since they appear to be reacting to the angels, who might otherwise be regarded as minor players. Furthermore, the saints seem to be attending specifically to their text.

The Bread of Angels

In her attention to Jerome, the Virgin seems to be considering his argument. None of the figures, in fact, engages the viewer or invites our supplication in the manner of a fifteenth-century sacra conversazione, and each member of the group seems provoked by a point of common concern. The angel duo is a visual key within this dynamic since their plump features, nestling legs, and glowing skin contrast markedly with the loosely worked, painterly style of the rest of the panel, especially in the spindly person of Jerome. Their conferring over the book – one mouth open, the other closed – must surely be a clue to the tenor, if not the meaning, of the whole. If the saints were devils, then these two angels assuredly show the saints to be a different sort of being, their bodies tense and wracked with human anxiety and doubt. It is a coincidence in terms of the subject, to say the least, that the surviving evidence of Rosso’s second commission from the 1520s is his Angel Playing a Lute (Plate XXVI).47 Extracted from a larger panel that may never have been finished, Rosso’s precision seems meaningful in its own right. He gives great care to his delineation of the angel, whose wings in green-red and red-gold play up his reddish curls against the darkened ground; the glowing instrument, which is too large for him, dominates the lower half of the panel. The angel is rapt in a concentration that is all the more profound for the disparity between him and the size of his lute. He is not tuning his instrument, as Cosmé Tura’s angel, among others, seems to be doing; thus, this is not a simple reference to the harmony of the spheres or a precocious anticipation of a vanitas or fortune motif.48 As a twelve-pegged lute, it is an instrument with six courses, or double strings. In the Cinquecento, it was more common for the highest string to be single, rather than double, so that the lute would have eleven tuning pegs.49 The number of frets on the neck, perhaps seven, is too few (by one) to make this a fully accurate image, although damage to the painting makes it hard to tell.50 In any event, while Rosso’s lute does resemble contemporary instruments, and contemporary portrayals of them, it does not show our angel to be playing it convincingly or correctly, according to sixteenth-century method.51 He reaches from behind the lute, with his fingers playing on top of the rose, or sound hole, which would not be correct. On the other hand, Rosso’s inaccuracies with respect to sixteenth-century performance practice do not necessarily alter the meaning or captivating quality of his beginner lutenist,

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who grapples with his outsize instrument. Like the Santa Maria Nuova angels who confer with mindfulness over their book, his absorption in his task, combined with his novice status as a proficient lutenist, evoke larger, possibly gently humorous themes to do with learning and practice and the acquisition of knowledge.52 These are entirely unangelic themes, and they suggest Rosso’s awareness of the misgivings that the musician angel may have aroused, misgivings that might be resolved by humor. Sarto’s angels are intriguing individuals in their own right, and Rosso imitated them on at least one occasion. For his startling Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels (Fig. 45), which he likely left unfinished before his Roman sojourn in the early 1520s, he moved Sarto’s angelic pair from behind the Virgin to the top of the panel where they and their green-mauve wings loom over the picture, their faces displaying similarly mixed expressions.53 Even if Sarto had no direct or formal role in Rosso’s training, we might imagine them together within the confines of SS. Annunziata talking about the problem of angels and about Gabriel, in particular, who himself would have been a natural topic given their location. In his major, early altarpiece of the Annunciation (1512), Sarto paired two angels again, and in a work where they are strictly ancillary.54 Behind Gabriel, as attentive onlookers, and standing directly below the dove, they offer a celestial imprimatur to the archangel messenger, serving as counterparts to the earthly spectators on a parapet at the left. This is very different from Sarto’s Pitti Annunciation (1528) in which both Gabriel and the Virgin, who are alone, seem equally stage-struck by the import of their communication, divided by a radiant light glowing between them. Sarto made another unusual choice with respect to angels in his Tobias Altarpiece (1512) (Fig. 46) for Santa Lucia in Settimello, near Florence, placing Archangel Raphael in the center, between Tobias and St. Leonard and the kneeling patron, Leonardo di Lorenzo Morelli.55 Notwithstanding the contemporary activities of the Archangel’s adult, flagellant confraternity, “il Raffa,” which can only speculatively be connected to the commission, this prominent placement of an angel, equal in pictorial importance to Michael or Gabriel, adheres to the apocryphal story of Raphael as an angel who had an exceptional investment in human affairs. Leonardo was a reader of religious, as well as classical literature, so that it is probable, as well, that he had a particular predilection for the panel’s story. He often

The Bread of Angels

45. Rosso Fiorentino, Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels (oil on panel) (c. 1518–1521) (161.29 × 119.38 cm) (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) (Photo credit: Digital Image © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY)

sent payments to Santa Lucia for the celebration of Mass in his chapel on both his own feast day and that of the Archangel, and when Leonardo’s descendents sponsored at least one of several copies of the altarpiece in the seventeenth century, it appears that the copyists omitted the patron and his namesake, portraying only Tobias and Raphael.56 Dressed in his soft green and purple garments, the angel turns with a gentle smile to Tobias

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46. Andrea del Sarto, Tobias Altarpiece (panel) (1512) (178 × 153 cm) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

and his dog, conveying at once both something of the silent wisdom of the angels and some share in his young companion’s mortal beauty. Sarto’s altarpiece, with Raphael as its subject, introduces new themes in the representation of angels. The heavenly orders had become something of a provocation for sixteenth-century artists. To depict them always means to commit to an existence and material nature that runs counter to their being, and this very fact preoccupied churchmen such as Luther from his earliest teachings; this angelic truism also ran counter to the naturalistic aesthetic tenets of the age. What purposes, aside from those of such named divine agents as Gabriel, Michael, or Raphael, did

Tobias and the Angel

angels serve in a sacred narrative, and to which levels of reality, to which illusions should they subscribe? In the Vatican Stanze, as we shall see, Raphael replied with a series of solutions that were faithful to Scripture and to theological prescription, from his archangels to his cloud-putti, to winged angels, and angels as wingless men who are nonetheless airborne, lightning-speed messengers. In Florence and in Rome, sixteenth-century artists asked these same questions, as Sarto’s and Rosso’s works suggest they did, although they answered them perhaps with less sovereign assurance than Raphael. Since the early fifteenth century, however, Archangel Raphael had spoken to a wider social spectrum than other angels, and within a broad public sphere beyond the Church: in dramatic performance and in music; as a patron of healing, marriage, disadvantaged youth, and the traveling sons of merchants. The artist, Raphael, must surely have relished his spiritual guardianship. Just as Archangel Raphael enjoyed a joke, so, too, did the artists who laughed with him, resolving thereby some of the perplexities of angelic nature by telling his story by means of lively, comic contradiction. These witticisms presupposed a witty beholder who could distinguish not only among the hierarchy of angels, but also among the hierarchies of meaning communicated by the work of art.

Tobias and the Angel Archangel Raphael is a principal angel in Judaism and Christianity, and his name comes from the Hebrew, rapha, meaning “to heal.”57 As one of the most sociable of angels, and in possession of great good humor, he is distinctive in these traits among the other archangels, chiefly Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel. He is distinctive in the Renaissance for the growing prominence of his story, which is derived from the Book of Tobit. This Book, like other apocryphal books such as Judith and Maccabees, was included in the Latin Vulgate Bible. Since 1546, when the fourth session of the Council of Trent proclaimed the Vulgate Bible authentic, the Book of Tobit has been treated as canonical (or deuterocanonical) within the Catholic tradition, and as apocryphal in Judaism (since it is not part of the Hebrew Canon), as well as in Protestantism.58 In his preface to the Book, Martin Luther noted that the work should be viewed as “a very beautiful, wholesome and useful fiction or drama.”59 Renaissance

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readers, however, would have been familiar with the Vulgate and particularly with Voragine’s Golden Legend; for them, Raphael and Tobias were as authentic as other holy persons, including the saints. The Book of Tobit, in which an angel has a powerful and salvific role, also has an angelic tradition like that of the Book of Daniel, the additions to which, in that instance, include the tales of Bel, the idol and dragon god; Susanna and the Elders; and Daniel’s companions, Ananias, Misael, and Azarias, who resist idol worship to the point that an angel must rescue them (Dan. 3; 17, 49). In the Book of Tobit, Raphael acts as a healer and exorcist who rewards piety and prayer while serving as a prescient teacher and guide. Originally written around the second century B.C.E., the story of the devout Tobit and his son, Tobias, unfolds in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in the late eighth century B.C.E., as the people of northern Israel have been taken captive.60 Raphael also accrued attributes outside the Book of Tobit. He is a guide in the underworld in the Book of Enoch (1 Enoch 22), and, according to one legend, it was he who passed on to Noah a medical text that may have been the Sefer Raziel, or Book of the Angel Raziel, assigned to the hand of Raziel, an archangel of the Kabbalah. In one strand of this narrative, Enoch came into possession of this book and passed it on to Noah. Noah, in turn, learnt from it how to build the ark. The thirteenth-century Kabbalist, Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, who was to be so influential for Pico, wrote, in point of fact, under the pen name Raziel. Before him, in the twelfth century, the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, pictured Raziel as leader of the order of erelim, the herald of the Deity and preceptor angel of Adam.61 Elsewhere in Enoch (40, 9), Raphael is mentioned as “one of the four presences,” and as “the second, who is set over all the diseases and all the wounds of the children of men.”62 In the medieval era, the Archangel Raphael is also a key protagonist in the first, independent description of a vision of the afterlife, the late seventh-century “best-seller” known as the Visio Baronti, written with a monastic readership in mind.63 The author, whose larger agenda was to advocate the transparent and altruistic disposition of wealth, knew well Gregory the Great’s Homilies on the Gospels, as well as Gregory’s Dialogues, and he was, of course, also familiar with the Book of Tobit.64 In Barontus’s vision, Raphael disputed with hungry demons through the

Tobias and the Angel

course of a day over the body of Barontus, the hapless monk whom they intended to take with them to Hell. Barontus was paralyzed, mute, and blind, laid low with a deadly fever. When the combatants agreed eventually to allow God to adjudicate, Raphael touched the monk’s throat and drew his soul out of his body, his soul “as small as a hen’s chick when it comes out of the egg.” Nonetheless, the soul carried with it Barontus’s whole person in a portable, air-borne form, complete with his bodily senses.65 The tug-of-war with the demons continued thereafter high in the air, and, even while battling his spirit nemeses, Raphael dexterously managed to cure a dying abbot whom they all spied on earth below them.66 Even at the first gate of Paradise, Raphael still had hopes of returning Barontus’s soul fully to his body. After praying with the monks, they then continued on their way through a series of celestial portals. Barred at the fourth entryway, Raphael entrusted an angel with finding St. Peter, who exacted from Barontus several financial penances to be fulfilled when he returned to earth. Eventually alighting on firm ground, by way of passage through Hell, the monk and his companions fulfilled their obligations.67 The author of this vision chose Raphael instead of Michael, the traditional guardian of souls, because Raphael was not only a healer but also an exemplar for the earthly life properly lived.68 He was also more clearly analogous to Christ. At least until the fourteenth century, if not later, readers of the Glossa Ordinaria of the Vulgate Bible would have perceived Raphael in strictly Christological ways so that Tobias’s fish refers to Christ and his miracles, including those of exorcism and healing. Bonaventure, in one of his sermons, even uses the story of Raphael and Tobias as a way to look beyond the angel who cannot, in the end, definitively cure souls, toward Christ, who can, and whose mercy saves humankind.69 Raphael was also a uniquely able and accessible paradigm within the mercantile culture of later medieval and Early Modern Italy, for he was not only a divine intercessor and advocate of the soul’s afterlife but also a just and reliable minister on earth who rewarded loyalty within the contexts of kin and family. The Book of Tobit tells two entwined stories, beginning with that of Tobit, the father of Tobias. These bear retelling, not least for their indelible portrait of Archangel Raphael as a fully embodied, wise and worldly being. Tobit’s narrative will intersect with that of Sarah, in far away Media, who is

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tormented by the demon, Asmodeus. Wed successively to seven husbands, each of whom she loses before their marriages can be consummated, she despairs.70 Tobit, in exile in Nineveh, endeavors to live charitably and piously following his release from imprisonment by the Assyrians. When seated at last at a feast with his family, he sends Tobias out to invite an impoverished person among Nineveh’s exiles. Tobias discovers instead a body in the market place, which his father retrieves; washing himself, Tobit continues with his meal. After sundown, Tobit buries the victim and sleeps in the open, with his face uncovered. As a judgment on the impurity of his actions, the droppings of sparrows fall into Tobit’s eyes, blinding him for four years. During this time, he quarrels with Anna, his wife, and resorts to prayer. Meanwhile, in Media, Sarah turns to thoughts of suicide, but decides to spare her father and prays instead. The combined prayers of Tobit and Sarah are answered: So Raphael was sent to heal both of them: Tobit, by removing the white films from his eyes, so that he might see God’s light with his eyes; and Sarah, daughter of Raguel, by giving her in marriage to Tobias son of Tobit, and by setting her free from the wicked demon Asmodeus. (Tobit 3, 16)

Tobit calls in Tobias, instructing him in the ways of family honor, piety, and charity, and charging him with retrieving talents of silver left in trust with Gabael in Media, for which mission his son must find a guide whom they will pay: “He went out and found the angel Raphael standing in front of him; but he did not perceive that he was an angel of God” (5, 4–5). Raphael claimed to come from Tobias’s kindred, the Israelites, and to know the way to Gabael. After a prophetic farewell from Raphael, who states only that he is Azariah (“Yahweh has helped”), the son of a relative, the pair departs. Accompanied by Tobias’s dog, they spend their first night beside the Tigris River from which waters a large fish tries to swallow Tobias’s foot. Raphael tells him to catch the creature, and to extract the gall, heart, and liver as useful medicines; Tobias eats some of the fish, keeping some aside. As they continue on their way, Raphael explains the powers of exorcism instilled in the smoke of the fish’s heart and liver when burned. The gall, he says, cures blindness when anointed on eyes on which a white film has formed; one laid the gall over them, accompanied by a puff of breath.

Tobias and the Angel

Raphael advises Tobias that they must stay with Raguel in Media, and that, moreover, Tobias should take Sarah as his wife, as was his right. The angel tells him that, with some of the fish’s liver and heart placed on the embers of incense in the bridal chamber, the demon afflicting Sarah will flee; then, the young couple must pray: “She was set apart for you before the world was made,” Raphael tells Tobias (6, 18). These events come to pass in Raguel’s house, whereupon Raphael, presumably with the velocity that was his nature, pursued the ousted demon to remotest Egypt where the spirit was bound “hand and foot” (8, 3). Tobias then entrusted Raphael to fulfill their errand to Rages, also in Media, to collect money from Gabael, who was then invited to the wedding feast. After the celebrations, Tobias and Sarah, together with half of Raguel’s possessions, made their way back to Tobit and Anna. Along the way, Raphael advised that the newly weds run on ahead and that Tobias prepare the fish’s gall. Greeted by his parents, Tobias blew on his father’s eyes and applied the gall, whereupon his father’s sight was restored. Tobit welcomed Sarah, and the union was celebrated again, after which Tobit and his son debated Raphael’s compensation. They concluded that he deserved no less than half of the possessions brought back with Tobias and Sarah. Raphael, wishing to speak privately with them, exhorts them to praise God; “prayer with fasting is good, but better than both is almsgiving with righteousness . . . “(12, 6–10). He then discloses his true identity and his part in presenting Tobit’s prayer before God: “And that time when you did not hesitate to get up and leave your dinner to go and bury the dead, I was sent to you to test you. And at the same time God sent me to heal you and Sarah your daughter-in-law. I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.” (12, 12–15)

This revelation shook Tobit and his son who fell to the ground in fear; in reassuring them, Raphael observes that: “As for me, when I was with you, I was not acting on my own will, but by the will of God. Bless him each and every day. . . . Although you were watching me, I really did not eat or drink anything – but what you saw was a vision. So now get up from the ground, and acknowledge God. See, I am ascending to him who sent me. Write down all these things that have happened to you.” And he ascended. (12, 16–20)

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Tobit uttered a long hymn of praise to God, and later died at a great age, to be buried in Nineveh “with great honor” (14, 1–2). Before his death, he begged Tobias to take his family to safety in Media, for he foresaw the invasion of Assyria and Nineveh, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem (14, 3–11). The specificity and narrative symmetry of the Book of Tobit, together with its colorful tale of quest and miraculous cure on behalf of a just and upright father, must explain much of its appeal for Renaissance artists and patrons. One of Raphael’s chief lessons, apart from the recognition due to those who honor the dead, is that almsgiving ensures its own freedom from death. In Barontus’s tale, St. Peter also expresses this view. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael articulates it at the moment before he reveals his true nature as angel: “For almsgiving saves from death and purges away every sin” (12, 9–10).71 Thus, for those who are materially prosperous, shouldering good works and almsgiving have a redemptive function. This moral was already well in play as far back as the second century, long before its repetition in Barontus’s vision. Among patristic commentators in Late Antiquity, Augustine’s mentor, Ambrose, wrote the longest and perhaps most important interpretation, although his treatise is more about the evils of avarice and usury than about the text itself. Tobias provides a simple lesson, without need of an allegorical reading.72 Before Ambrose, it was Origen, with characteristic originality, who saw the book as a rich source of historical evidence with respect to the circumstances of Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C.E.73 Jerome, ever the individualist where angels were concerned, seems to have perceived the Odyssian resonance in Tobit, and inserted one telling element in his translation from the Greek and Aramaic to prove it, an element that appears nowhere else among the redactions: namely, the wagging tail of Tobias’s dog as he returned home to Tobit.74 Jerome, who was passionate about the classics, likened the dog to Argus arriving in the home of Odysseus’s father, and he made this erudite reference even though, in the end, he believed the Book of Tobit to be uncanonical. The Venerable Bede (c. 672–735), by contrast, waxed lyrical and at length on the doctrinal import of Tobit’s Book, parsing every event.75 After him, other medieval exegetes followed, including Hugh of Saint Victor in the twelfth century.76 Tobit’s Book possesses correspondences with the Book of Jonah, including its geographical setting, its journey, efficacious prayer, and

Tobias and the Angel

instrumental fish. There are also correspondences with the Book of Job in which almsgiving, fortitude, and depression equally play their parts. These parallels were noted by early exegetes. Cyprian, in the third century, even observed that both the wives of Tobit and Jonah mocked them; Augustine was particularly struck by the men’s stoicism.77 In the medieval period, Dante clearly drew inspiration from this as well as other ancient accounts of epic and ascetical journeys in his own portrait of an angel-like guide who navigates the shoals of strange lands. In his Paradiso (4, 46–48), Beatrice alludes to Raphael and the archangels in a telling reflection on the limits of the human senses, and the reasons why Scripture and the Church “condescend” to endow the angels “with human features.”78 For confraternities in the Early Modern era, Raphael was the ideal patron, and in Venice, where church dedications can often be unusual in comparison with other Italian centers, the Archangel has not only his own scuola, the Scuola dell’Angelo Custode, now the home of Italy’s oldest Lutheran congregation, but also his own church.79 This afterlife of the confraternity’s institution is not coincidental since Luther had himself drawn daring analogies between the Book of Tobit and Greek comedy, articulating the theatrical potential of the narrative, which, in fact, Renaissance dramatic troupes had by then long exploited.80 The earliest surviving fresco from the medieval era is also in northern Italy, in San Zeno, Verona, dating to c. 1350, while the first, documented Florentine example is a fresco cycle in the loggia of the confraternity of the Misericordia, from c. 1360, at the threshold of the subject’s flowering in Tuscany. This was followed by Bicci di Lorenzo’s (or his workshop’s) Crucifixion with Raphael and Tobias (c. 1440).81 As the quintessential guardian angel who assumed corporeal form for an extended earthly sojourn dedicated to good works – even though he would later claim that his eating and drinking had been a “vision” – Raphael held a notable and active social profile among Italy’s religious and lay communities. By the late sixteenth century, the assimilation of Raphael with the figure of the guardian angel was understood even though, in the Book of Tobit, his was a time-sensitive errand. He himself emphasizes his role as a messenger who carries prayers and reports of good deeds to heaven and rewards from God back to earth.82 The visual record is as long-lived as the written one, going back as far as Rome’s Catacomb of the Giordani (as one of three such examples)

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where, in a fresco, Raphael instructs Tobias to gut his fish, as well as to ancient medallions.83 From eleventh-century Bibles to twelfth-century carvings, the story of Tobit became only gradually popular until it appeared in twelve episodes on the archivolt of the right portal of the north porch at Chartres (1194–1230).84 The early medieval iconography of the wayfaring pair may have derived from the East, from images of Archangel Uriel guiding the infant St. John the Baptist across the desert, appearing first in territories under Byzantine influence, such as Venice where it was known by the late thirteenth century.85 Visual interpretations, like patristic glosses, reconciled Tobias’s story to the miracles of Christ; Raphael’s command to Tobias on the shores of the Tigris showed him capable of transforming fish into salvific forms.86 Later medieval vision narratives akin to Barontus’s would appeal to new lay and noble audiences, rather than exclusively to the religious. This in itself is a testament to the universality of Raphael’s message about God’s righteousness, of altruism and filial piety. In Italy, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a group of well-known artists and members of their workshops responded to a range of corporate and individual patrons, persons of both modest and ample means. These artists included Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Francesco Botticini, Filippino Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, the young Leonardo with Verrocchio, and Giovanni Savoldo. Most of them focused on the pair of Tobias and Raphael, and they generally represented the couple with the fish swinging from Tobias’s hand and the dog beside them.87 For civic-minded Tuscans, the conjunction of ideals of familial loyalty with public benefaction must have been especially meaningful. A more subtle message lay, as well, in the fact that Tobias had so effectively reclaimed and then increased his family’s prosperity, both by way of soliciting an old debt and by marrying judiciously. The patrons, Raphael and Tobias, are, by association, custodians and protectors not only of the body and soul but also of tangible, earthly practices and goods: bookkeeping, just compensation, gift-giving, magnanimous hospitality, and, above all, material riches.88 For the security of the sons of Florentines traveling abroad, their fathers frequently sponsored small images of the pair as votives to ensure their safekeeping.89 From the mid-fifteenth century onward, Tobias and Raphael appeared together either as an autonomous subject or in altarpieces among

Tobias and the Angel

the saints beside the Virgin’s throne. The differences among this group can often be explained by the circumstances of their commissions and their audiences. There were also exceptions to artists’ tendencies to concentrate on the pair alone, such as the Misericordia fresco cycle of the Trecento or Giuliano Bugiardini’s pair of episodic panels of c. 1500, which display the sequence of events in engaging, vivacious detail appropriate to a secular, domestic interior.90 In a few instances, Raphael also appears without Tobias, but with his colleagues, Gabriel and Michael.91 This iconography can be linked to the Florentine Compagnia del’Arcangelo Raffaello (“detta della Scala”), a youth confraternity founded in 1411 that possessed a chapel in the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito.92 In the mid-1460s, Neri di Bicci produced this schema twice, once for a friar and again for a merchant. Botticini included Gabriel and Michael together with Raphael and his charge in his own painting for the confraternity’s chapel, probably in an attempt to modernize Neri’s version (Fig. 47).93 He, like Neri, was also a member of the brotherhood. Wearing a belted chiton and sandals, Raphael appears here in his recognizable, archaizing angel-costume while Tobias is outfitted as the son of a

47. Francesco Botticini, Three Archangels with Tobias (panel) (c. 1470) (153 × 154 cm) (Uffizi) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

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48. Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo, Tobias and the Angel (panel) (1460) (Galleria Sabauda, Turin) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

well-to-do Florentine. The elegance of costume and dancing line among Botticini’s figures bear comparison with the young Leonardo and Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel (Plate XXVII).94 Verrocchio, for his part, was looking carefully at the Pollaiuoli’s Tobias and the Angel (Fig. 48), and he

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and his young apprentice together probed the possibilities for a more psychologically complex portrait.95 By contrast, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli and Botticini (in a second work) placed the pair in the company of the Madonna and saints in their altarpieces.96 Botticini’s panel, his second Tobias subject, was commissioned by Ottavio Doni for the Badia, and it honored his son, Raffaello.97 Botticelli’s large work, on the other hand, his Trinity with Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, Tobias and Raphael (Fig. 49), was likely intended for the high altar of Florence’s conventual church of Sant’Elizabetta delle Convertite. Like Santo Spirito, this was an Augustinian foundation,

49. Sandro Botticelli, The Trinity with Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, Tobias and Raphael (tempera on panel) (1491–1493) (215 × 192 cm) (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London) (Photo credit: © Samuel Courtauld Trust. The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

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although under the protection of Mary Magdalene, and it welcomed repentant prostitutes.98 The lay patrons at Sant’Elizabetta were members of a guild, the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, which explains Tobias’s and Raphael’s presence in the scene given their collaboration as skilled healers. This guild also welcomed painters.99 Botticelli seems, as well, to have labored on the panel in an unusual way over his revisions to the composition. He may have intended to place Tobias and Raphael further back where their relatively miniature sizes would have made better sense.100 As the small figures move across the foreground in the finished work, however, with Raphael’s hand clasping Tobias’s, we see evoked a gentle, tacit understanding between them, even though they seem to have momentarily mislaid their dog. He is, incidentally, the only friendly dog in biblical literature. The interplay among visible and invisible, human and divine, that is inherent to the text as well as to Raphael’s fundamental nature as an angel is absent in these paintings. Although Tobit and his family are fully persuaded of Raphael’s humanity in the story, we, as viewers, see his wings in these pictorial inventions. In Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s panel, for example, the Archangel’s large, swanlike wing curves over the head of his charge, subverting the illusion of metamorphosis even as it explains the figure’s identity.101 Conversely, the sight of his wings underscores the angel’s divine directive to take on human guise, and symbolizes his protection. In a practical light, his wings also serve, together with his larger size, to distinguish him from Tobias who, in the Book, is actually a mature and marriageable youth rather than a boy. The fish is also a visual conundrum, as well, because it is referred to in the text as a large, even monstrous beast who presented a danger to Tobias. Furthermore, by the time the pair had left the banks of the Tigris, the creature had been dismembered. These elements, the wings and the fish, constitute comic synecdoches for the story as a whole, for they are knowing winks to the observer, by antithesis, of its deeper import.102 The narrative, after all, is about Raphael as a custodian who, through affectionate and wily means, dupes his human family. Raphael’s errand depends on visual deception, just as it also depends on the several meanings attaching to sight and to blindness – both with respect to bodily sense and as a metaphor for illumination, ultimately, and the full apprehension of God.

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In later-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century renditions, the likeness of Raphael to human persons becomes even greater, as if to suggest the reciprocal qualities of humans and angels. The natural setting also expands. An Italian northerner, Cima da Conegliano, effects a compromise between the sacra conversazione and a pastoral scene in his Archangel Raphael with Tobias Between SS. Nicholas and James Major (Plate XXVIII). The two companions pause on an oddly placed hillock that intervenes between Nicholas and James.103 In Cima’s Nativity with SS. Helen and Catherine of Alexandria, Archangel Raphael and Tobias for Venice’s Carmine (Fig. 50), by contrast, the pair stand amicably to the side, opposite two young shepherds. In his lyrical oil painting, Giovanni Savoldo depicts the couple pausing in the landscape as if in Virgilian reverie, the fish’s open mouth and sleeping dog bracketing them. Raphael, with his capacious wings, instructs Tobias as to what he must do (Plate XXIX). The pair partakes of the same rules of nature, including proportion, for each is a handsome, possibly identifiable youth, and they wear the same contrasting white and rose-orange garments.104 In Renaissance portrayals of them, Tobias seems often, in fact, to bear the likeness of a son, the young member of the patron’s household in whose honor and for whose protection the works were often commissioned. The enchantment inherent in Tobias’s story – its extended journey and its abundant detail – seems to have inspired artists on both sides of the Alps to treat the landscape increasingly as a subject in its own right. Into the seventeenth century, the pair appears often only as a minor motif in landscape paintings, as if one fissure in nature’s order of things, namely, Raphael’s incarnation as a young man, motivated artists to reflect on the empirical measures of the observed world, in general. Northern artists led the way, perhaps inspired in part by the proliferation of prints drawn from the Book that issued from presses in the Low Countries after the mid-sixteenth century. In Venice, Titian’s name is linked to at least two Tobias commissions: first, to a work for the church of Santa Caterina (1514) (now in the Accademia), and, second (with his workshop), to an altarpiece of Tobias and the Angel Raphael and St. John the Baptist for San Marziale (1545). About two decades later, his San Marziale canvas (now in the church of the Madonna dell’Orto) inspired one of many northern artists, Lambert Sustris, a Dutchman who ended his career in Venice.105

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50. Cima da Conegliano, The Nativity with SS. Helen and Catherine of Alexandria, Archangel Raphael and Tobias (oil on panel), Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice (Photo credit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY)

Landscape dominated in smaller portrayals, as well. Two anonymous Venetian panels of 1550 portray episodes from Tobit: Tobit and his son burying their fallen neighbor outside the city walls, and Raphael and Tobias by the Tigris as a large fish lurches toward them (Figs. 51–52).

Tobias and the Angel

51. Anonymous, Old Tobit Burying a Jew in Nineveh (panel) (1550) (18 × 44 cm) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

52. Anonymous, Tobias Threatened by a Fish (panel) (1550) (18 × 44 cm) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) (Photo credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

These works were probably destined for a cassone, or marriage chest, deftly uniting, therefore, the rituals of exchange governing Renaissance marriage with the tale’s own themes of piety, conjugal felicity, and material prosperity. In the two panels, the figures occupy only a third of the composition, giving way to views of woods, a distant city, river banks, and blue mountains. Sustris places his pair in the foreground, but behind them rise a swiftly running river, a far view of an isolated settlement and small figures (Plate XXX). While he may have seen his northern colleagues’ renditions of Tobias themes – most definitively, Jan van Scorel’s, in whose workshop he was trained – he gave great lyrical expression here to the natural setting, which evokes the glistening vistas of the Veneto.106 For patrons whose livelihoods depended on trade and travel, the central image of the guardian angel, his bird-wings protectively overshadowing the small boy, must have held a particularly effective, even talismanic power. For beholders of these subjects, in general, there were other ways in which Tobias and Raphael were meaningful in the Early Modern context.

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The motif of the older youth, joined by hand to his young charge, giving educative counsel and moral guidance, lends itself to Renaissance ideals of friendship and love, especially to the theme of male love.107 One arena in which the spiritual, pedagogical, and social identities of Florentine men came together was in the confraternity, particularly the youth confraternity. The Compagnia dell’Arcangelo Raffaello was, in fact, Florence’s first confraternity, founded by an unknown gold-leaf artisan. In a Bull of 1442, while still in Florence, Pope Eugenius IV established Archangel Raphael as the Compagnia’s patron when he formally recognized them along with three other youth brotherhoods.108 As an extension of its religious and social mission, the society played a leading role in the theatrical and musical life of the city after its beginnings as a laudesi company dedicated to the protection and education of boys from the ages of twelve to twenty.109 This fact alone is important since children and youths under twenty-four comprised just over 50 percent of Florence’s population, as revealed by the tax census of 1427–1430.110 The lay leaders of the body came to be known as Guardian Fathers, while a member of a local religious order, either a Benedictine or Dominican, was designated a Father Corrector. These held office alongside the Chapel Masters.111 The Compagnia maintained a vital theatrical culture that came to involve older youths of ages up to thirty. Later still, it welcomed adults.112 By the late sixteenth century, Arcangelo Raffaello was a leading center in Florence for musical education and performance, and it was perhaps the discipline of music, above all, in concert with the dramatic and visual arts, that put the confraternity on the European map.113 From its beginnings, the confraternity taught music and hosted performances, and the boys sang in both Latin and the volgare. They sang in the vernacular usually only at Christmas as well as on their own feast day in December, and they focused on the Nativity.114 In Luca della Robbia’s marble choir loft of 1421–1438 for the city’s cathedral (see Fig. 30), we may see, in actuality, portraits of boys from Arcangelo Raffaello or from another youth brotherhood.115 This would explain their older ages in the reliefs – for they are not children or putti – and it explains the more informal arrangement of the young figures in the sculpted panels, for they are not arranged as a formal choir.116 Notable among the confraternity’s musical instruments were their organs. The first surviving

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reference to these is from the feast of Corpus Domini in 1561, when many organs accompanied the company’s Vespers. That the institution housed many organs is exceptional, and it seems that the brothers brought in their own since at the time the institution did not own even one.117 It is possible that these organs brought from home resembled the portable organs played by angels in works of art, including those heavenly musicians in Arcangelo Raffaello’s own fresco, behind the oratory’s high altar, of Musician Angels Adoring the Trinity.118 As for their collection of art, among approximately fifty works, including painted terracotta sculptures, there were about ten subjects drawn from Tobit, including processional banners. A Vision of Jacob appears in the records, as well as a panel of Jacob’s Ladder, which showed God the Father, Jacob, and the angels descending and ascending as Raphael led confraternal youths toward them.119 Among the better-known artists represented in the collection is Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521), whose panel of the Madonna and Child with SS. Dominic and Jerome included angels on the wings, as well as four more circling above the Virgin.120 After the mid-sixteenth century, on feast days, at Easter or for the Forty Hours, objects from the collection were brought out of storage. Artists also belonged to the sodality. In 1489–1490, the painter, Cosimo Rosselli, was a Guardian Father, as was the artist, Antonio di Tommaso miniature, in 1525. These were distinct honors since the position of Guardian Father was the most senior one, and it was held for life. From the sixteenth century onward, artists donated their works, including a terracotta pair of Tobias and the angel by the sculptor, Giovan Battista di Bartolomeo. This was a joint gift, in 1561, from three artists.121 Costumed singing took place regularly at Arcangelo Raffaello after the late Cinquecento, in addition to the performances of the Nativity for which they were chiefly known.122 The brotherhood traditionally celebrated the feast of their Archangel on 31 December, a date that perhaps had nothing to do with Raphael himself but, rather, with the site of their first meeting hall at San Silvestro.123 On 22 July, they also paid tribute to another healer, to Mary Magdalene, who was their advocate. Her feast became eclipsed following the Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine’s attendance at Raffaello’s ceremonies in 1591, after which she enrolled her son, the future Grand Duke Cosimo II. By this time, the religious aspects of the festivities in the oratory were accompanied by secular rituals such

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as distributing bread that had been blessed and performing dramatic works. A small boy playing Tobias participated in the ceremonies after Mass with the aid of two Virtues, Humility and Obedience. With Duchess Christine watching on, the youths dressed as angels and sang madrigals and other pieces. To orchestrate these events, a group of youths acted as provveditori and festaiuoli.124 Among the lesser feasts, there was that of the Quarant’ore, or Devotion of the Forty Hours, which gained ground following Trent. This ritual brings us back in one way to images of the dead Christ, such as Rosso’s, for it derives from the medieval tradition of “entombing” the Host in a tabernacle during Holy Week, in memory of the forty hours from Good Friday to Easter morning that Christ spent in his sepulcher. The Forty Hours devotion was extended to other days in the religious calendar. In 1527, it was held at Pentecost and the Assumption, as well, and it was enacted in settings outside the oratories of confraternities, such as in parish churches.125 At Arcangelo Raffaello, the brothers kept watch over the sacred body much like the angels in Rosso’s painting, praying continually through the forty hours. They also built a complex apparato, or ephemeral set, for the occasion. Young confraternity members wrote and delivered sermons for this devotion, a practice that was quite common among youth confraternities. At the end of the Forty Hours, the Sacrament was brought in procession to its tabernacle in the smaller oratory, accompanied by young brothers in gowns with torches. As another indication of the confraternity’s devotion to the Sacrament, they collaborated in even greater numbers in Florence’s Corpus Domini processions than they did for the feast of St. John the Baptist, although this can only be established for certain for the later period of the seventeenth century.126 Besides their own special feast days, the confraternity was an active in Florence’s annual cycle of pageants, and they were also visible in penitential processions, in times of war, for example, or in drought or incessant rain.127 In 1560, all of the confraternities of Florence processed to the Duomo, and in 1561, they walked to San Marco and SS. Annunziata to pray for a good outcome at the Council of Trent.128 In 1454, out of concern for the increasingly secular character of the celebrations, Archbishop Antoninus had revised the chronology and structure of the annual civic procession in honor of St. John the Baptist, setting apart the

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parade of floats from other events. Florence’s nine youth confraternities were to walk in second place, he stipulated, following the orders of friars. Within their group, the most recently founded confraternity would march first, while the most prestigious place, the last, was allotted to Arcangelo Raffaello.129 None other than Matteo Palmieri described the floats connected to the feast day of St. John the Baptist but staged two day before, on 22 June, according to Antoninus’s specifications. In third place was the float of Archangel Michael “with a representation of the fall of Lucifer,” following which was one float belonging to the members of Arcangelo Raffaello.130 When a drunken German spectator climbed on to another confraternal float, the Temple of Peace, and threw the actor playing Emperor Augustus into the crowd, the boys of the confraternity playing angels on the Temple’s roof used their angelic batons to unusual purposes, beating him and, “not without some difficulty,” sending him to the ground.131 These pageants continued into the sixteenth century, but they were less conspicuously secular and theatrical in nature than they had been in the Quattrocento. Nevertheless, some features occasionally remained and, in general, it was not unusual to see young boys dressed as angels in civic processions in Italy. By the later sixteenth century, Arcangelo Raffaello was in possession of a wagon from which the company likely contributed musical interludes with both voices and instruments. On 23 June 1582, members of Arcangelo Raffaello dressed up as Tobias and the Archangel, and they were accompanied by a choir of twelve angels singing a madrigal in honor of St. John the Baptist that had been composed by one of them: “Now we, angels of highest heaven, / Announce to you the joy and song / Of those heavenly souls in this holy day.”132 Alongside these spectacles, the Arcangelo Raffaello was well-known for its performance of the Nativity, which they undertook, most famously, before Pope Eugenius IV and the full Signoria of the city in 1430. This led to their being called on occasion the confraternity “of the Nativity,” and the brothers wore an emblem of the Nativity on the right shoulders of their uniform.133 This play became part of their contribution to the floats for the feast of John the Baptist, for they performed it on the confraternal float, as Palmieri had observed. Most interesting for our purposes, however, were the Raphael and Tobias plays, which paid tribute to their patron saint and his charge. The

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youths, themselves of varied ages, surely identified with this duo. These dramatic works could be short reenactments of a visit by the Archangel or simply represent Tobias, as if to remind their audiences of the continuities between themselves and the Jewish boy, and of the angel’s universal lessons.134 These plays tended to be performed on their feast day in December during which Tobias would address the confraternity and admonish the outgoing office-holders. Raphael sent Humility and Obedience as his companions among the brothers to help distribute the panellini, the special bread with their emblem impressed upon it. The pair might also reprimand the brothers with respect to their devotions and ritual.135 On one such occasion, in 1582, Tobias arrived incognito, as a pilgrim, before revealing himself – an interesting switch in identity. When Raphael arrived, he was in the company of two angels (as in some artistic compositions), and all three sang a madrigal. There followed a lesson on Christian doctrine. At other times, the boys and young men simply performed the narrative of the Book of Tobit, although this is recorded securely only for the seventeenth century when, in 1624, they presented Jacopo Cicognini’s La celeste guida (The Heavenly Guide).136 Nevertheless, the dramatist’s focus on the conclusion of the story, and the special delight the audience felt on Raphael’s transformation, may evoke something of the focus and fascination for earlier spectators of earlier productions. A member of the company wrote of this later production: They called for Azarias and offered him half their wealth, but he thanked them and revealed himself for who he was. In the act of revealing himself, the Archangel Raphael shook and filled the hearts of all the spectators with most sweet awe and an uncommon fright. At the same time, with unexpected marvel, he changed costume and form, for first he had appeared to be a pilgrim. Nor could one tell how, for those clothes and hat were removed as if by a miracle of God [“divinamente”], so that in a flash he transformed himself from a pilgrim into an angel dressed in a light cotton gown that was flesh-coloured with white interfacing and adorned in satin, and it was all laced in gold, and with the appropriate wig [“capelliera”], so much so that the spectators could not hold back their tears and, all filled with spiritual consolation, they concluded that the scope and intentions of the youths of the Confraternity had been attained and every pleasure had resolved itself in most devout concern [“compuntione”].

Tobias and the Angel

When the fifth act of the play had ended, the Archangel Raphael appeared again, accompanied by the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy, as if he were about to return to his heavenly homeland. Then, of a sudden, the forum and the gate of the city of Nineveh widened and the sky opened, and the Eternal Father appeared in a most bright and sublime throne, adored by angels. And from the heavenly seat a ladder made of clouds descended to the earth, on which the Archangel Raphael climbed in slow steps, leading with him the above-mentioned Virtues, singing all the while . . .137

After the fall of the Medici in 1494, with the ascent to power of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, the prior of the Dominican convent at San Marco, the campaign for youth reform in Florence would extend beyond the confraternities to the quartieri, to the districts of Florence. The reformer explicitly sought out younger boys not affiliated with confraternities, for he regarded these sodalities with suspicion.138 Chroniclers favoring the Savonarolan cause were quick to point out the many vices from which Florentine youth should be protected, including gambling, cursing and gluttony, as well as girlish dress and sodomy.139 As with Antoninus’s reforms, Savonarola’s proscriptions are revealing as much for the views and practices they assume as for their recommendations. On one side, we have the impression that the boys of the city, whether in confraternities or not, were like boys always and everywhere. On the other side, as some polemicists on behalf of the reforms stressed, boys in youth organizations could be models of peaceful and pious social responsibility for their older compatriots, and they might equally be protected by their membership from the pitfalls to which they were thought to be susceptible. The confraternity’s detailed statutes of 1468, for example, included the sentiment that the brothers were to keep themselves chaste; if they had “that most precious and angelic gift,” they should remain so. Should a brother commit “the wicked and horrible vice of sodomy,” he would be immediately expelled.140 In these ways, Raphael and Tobias drew to themselves not only the associations of piety, education, cultural prowess, and group identity that were such powerful forces in Italian confraternal life, for their appearance also suggested more personal ideals that could be traced to the angels themselves – ideals such as moral exemplarity and selflessness in counterpoint with desire.

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Raphael Transfigured The young artist, Raphael, arrived in Florence in 1504. He could not have failed to notice the boisterous presence of the youth brotherhoods, but especially that of Arcangelo Raffaello, the old confraternity dedicated to his name saint. In c. 1512–1514, he completed his own panel, the so-called Madonna with the Fish (Fig. 53), in which the Archangel Raphael gently leads Tobias toward the Virgin and Child, opposite St. Jerome.141 The reciprocated glances of the Christ Child and the boy, who shyly genuflects, as well as the yearning profile of the older angel – perhaps a poetically conceived likeness of the artist himself – evoke a mutual

53. Raphael, Madonna of the Fish (oil on canvas, transferred from panel) (c. 1512–1514) (215 × 158 cm) (Museo del Prado, Madrid) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Raphael Transfigured

affection and circle of understanding that we witness from the outside as a privileged exchange. Tobias’s gesture, as his hand is gently led by Raphael’s toward the Virgin, is one of tentative probing, as if to test by touch the material existence of the holy figures. This is a delicious visual pun on the part of the artist. In the course of his short career, Raphael was keenly aware of the many meanings of the senses, especially of sight, and also of the multivalence of angels. He dwelt on the interconnections among these. He was in command of sight, first, as a sensory experience over which he, as an artist, was in control, but he was aware of sight, as well, as a metaphor for discovery and enlightenment. These themes of sight and insight, of vision in the most inclusive sense, coincide in the figure of the angel who may be present yet invisible; light-filled yet without body; divine intermediary and earthly trickster. Among artists in his day, Raphael was an unparalleled and ingenious master of the visionary, in general, and of the angels, in particular.142 Raphael’s last painting, the work that graced his funeral casket in 1520, was his unfinished Transfiguration, commissioned several years earlier by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (Fig. 54).143 The artist brought together the scene of the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor with an episode from one of the miracles, the curing of a boy possessed by demons. Both events were drawn from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 17; Mark 9; Luke 9). In the upper part of the work, Christ rises above the mountain top, as the three Apostles who went with him writhe and shield themselves from blinding brightness, a symbol of God’s acknowledgment of his son. The Apostles in their dark realm below gesture upwards and to one another, but they must wait for Christ to return for the miracle of the healing of the boy to occur. For this reason, this episode is also known as the “failure to heal.”144 The painting has justly received much attention, as much for its formal innovations as for its metaphysical puzzles. As a composition in two distinct parts – light and dark, supernatural and earthly – and, above all, as a theatrical exposition of the symbolic potential of light itself to transfigure, Raphael’s altarpiece was unsurpassed in its day. His was an essay in vision as both a physical operation and metaphysical construct whereby, through pictorial presence, both the protagonists and the beholder are led to the highest form of spiritual apprehension and nonbodily contemplation.145 No artist before Raphael had brought these

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54. Raphael, Transfiguration (oil on panel) (1518–1520) (405 × 278 cm) (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

two episodes together, and no one has managed to explain conclusively and comprehensively why he did.146 Vasari gives us a hint in his encomium on the painting, and in his description of Raphael laying down his brush just before he died, as if he had invested something in the work that was so profoundly personal and so profoundly religious that he could do no more. The topic of the

Raphael Transfigured

possessed boy is, by itself, an unusual choice for a miracle for its rendition requires visible evidence of bodily possession by invisible spirits. Raphael gives us the testimony of the ungainly, twisted body of the boy, and the excitement and yet helpless witness of his family and the Apostles. They are all brought into sharp conjunction with the radiant, floating person of Christ high above them, for he is suspended in the air between the prophets, looking upward, beyond the picture, to his father. The picture not only attested to Christ’s miracle and impending act of healing, for contemporaries, especially those in curial circles, may have recognized that it was also, more broadly, a painting about the healing power of Raphael’s art. Members of the Medici family, including Pope Leo X, understood this miraculous healing in light of the medieval, Augustinian tradition of “Christus Medicus.” The renowned courtier, Raphael’s friend, Baldassare Castiglione, in his encomium to the artist, likened Raphael to Asclepius, son of Apollo, and a Greek miracle worker and healer from the third century B.C.E.147 Likewise, a contemporary epigram, likely written by Antonio Tebaldeo, made the connection between the sovereign powers of Raphael and those of Christ clear: “On the painter Raphael. What marvel if you died on the same day as Christ did? He was the god of Nature, you of art.”148 These comparisons were not unusual around the time of the artist’s death. Surely Raphael’s own name comes into play here, as several modern commentators have noted in passing, for his namesake, Archangel Raphael, was also a “healer sent from God,” according to the derivation of his name.149 Raphael, the artist, can be likened, then, not only to Asclepius and the sun, by way of Apollo, as well as to Christ, but also to his own angel. Patristic commentators had long compared Archangel Raphael to these same divinities. On earth, he was Christ’s delegate and emissary.150 The patron, Cardinal Giulio, might originally have selected the two events of the work by reason of the liturgical calendar, specifically Lent and Embertide, as well as by reason of his first titulus and accession to the College of Cardinals in September 1513.151 Nevertheless, he must also have also relished the punning coincidence of his own and his artist’s names with respect to themes of healing, both his – Medici – and that of his divine artist.152 Raphael may have set to work on the subject of the boy possessed by demons keenly mindful of the analogy with Archangel Raphael, the expert exorcist as well as healer. In medieval

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times, this angel’s contest with demons became one of his identifying characteristics, as Barontus’s vision shows. In any event, the painting remained with Raphael over an extended period, likely shifting into different focus after its initial, direct links to Giulio and his first titulus changed. In this context, an early modello for the composition from Raphael’s workshop, showing God the Father above his Son, who stands on Mount Tabor, is worth noting. The figure of God is accompanied by a bright cloud that shelters angels. Their presence testifies perhaps to divine mystery and divine wisdom, and to the ineluctable boundaries between mortal and divine beings that is demonstrated and yet broken at this very moment.153 Angels are essentially creatures of light, even if they are instructed, as the Archangel had been, to assume human form and thus deceive the human senses. Perhaps the artist reflected in this vein, as well. Like the event of the Transfiguration, the painting itself is above all and overwhelmingly about light. Raphael shows the over-shadowing cloud of Scripture, a cloud of brightness that signals Christ’s ineffable nature even as his corporeal being is momentarily transformed. The panel is organized accordingly into light and dark realms, with the gesticulating young boy at the lower right turning his face upward to the light even as his eyes roll back in blindness. The artist himself, then, becomes a kind of potential exorcist with unnatural powers over the demonic, for he is able to represent the possessing spirit masquerading as a body as well as the means of its expulsion.154 In these occult arts, demons were not so alien from angels; nor were artists so very different from spirits. That Raphael had in mind the Book of Tobit is tantalizingly suggested by a strange and otherwise inexplicable motif at the lower left of the painting, for what appears to be a fish emerges from the water, a form compatible with those depicted in Raphael’s cartoon and tapestry of The Miraculous Draft of Fishes.155 Luke describes both events, and Raphael chose two consecutive moments, as he had in his last work: that of Peter’s confession, on one boat, alongside the wonder of the great haul of fish. Not only is the painting, then, about the therapeutic potency of art or about Renaissance concepts of vision, for it is also about Raphael as consciously modeling himself on his Archangel forbear, enacting his last, earthly miracle as exorcist and healer, as a master of sight and its necessary conditions of illumination. For these reasons, the salvation

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of the boy possessed, like the salvation of Tobit’s blind father and the exorcism of Sarah’s demons, recommended itself to Raphael not simply by analogy with Christ, as his contemporaries viewed it, but by pointed analogy with Archangel Raphael, God’s jovial and winsome messenger angel who performed miracles on earth. efh

Raphael was a master of angels, deftly combining their theological essence and scriptural identity with a formal invention that defies comparison with his peers. In both single works and larger, programmatic commissions, he attended to his “siblings” with a heightened sensitivity to their kind. Across the rooms of the papal Stanze, where he and his workshop began work in c. 1509, angels act as witnesses and intervene as agents to an extraordinary degree. Recalling the tradition going back at least as far as the papacy of Martin V Colonna that angels are dedicated advocates and protectors of the papacy, Raphael and his workshop after him subtly and ingeniously interspersed angels among the narratives across the suite of apartments. In his first fresco, Theology (or the Disputà) (see Fig. 22), in the Stanza della Segnatura, he portrayed the orders of angels with a classificatory exactness that is matched by his artistic imagination. Beside God the Father and Christ, who is seated within a mandorla of red and bluewinged Seraphim and Cherubim, six full-bodied angels hover, talking among themselves and watching the figures below. Their shot-silk colors, as in the angel third from right, in blue and mauve, convey their supernatural essence. Behind them are cloud putti, or full-bodied, winged infant-angels as white-grey condensations of air, as Aquinas defined them (Question 51, Article 2: “Whether angels have bodies”): Reply to Objection 3: Although air as long as it is in a state of rarefaction has neither shape nor color, yet when condensed it can both be shaped and colored as appears in the clouds. Even so the angels assume bodies of air, condensing it by the Divine power in so far as is needful for forming the assumed body.156

Raphael must have seen Filippino Lippi’s inventive cloud putti in the Carafa Chapel, a monument that honored Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor who was their theological progenitor.157 The artist may also have

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55. Fra Bartolomeo, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (Pala Pitti) (oil on panel) (1512) (356 x 270 cm) (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) (Photo credit: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY)

reflected on his friend, Fra Bartolomeo’s cloud putti, if we are to believe Vasari’s account of their exchange of knowledge: Raphael taught the Dominican perspective while the friar reciprocated on the subject of color.158 For his part, Fra Bartolomeo proved himself equal to the legacy of Fra Angelico in the clarity and formal invention of his angels. In his panel of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (1512) (Fig. 55), known as the Pala Pitti, and in a clever reprise of the choral dance, he depicts four angels lifting the curtains of the green canopy above the Virgin and

Raphael Transfigured

saints, giving us a dynamic, sharply lit back view of his left, airborne angel whose rainbow-colored wings seem to beat with the motion of flight. On the steps below, two musician angels portend Rosso’s own, including his famous lutenist.159 If, as Vasari tells us, the friar used wooden mannequins to study the poses of his figures, then this might explain the contrast between the vigorous forms of the angels, reminiscent of Rosso’s Assumption in SS. Annunziata, and the flatter, stiffer divine assembly below.160 In the Disputà, at the lowest level of the celestial superstructure, the heads and wings of cherubs, who are related here to the elevated Cherubim, are embedded in the ledge of cloud, behind four, fullbodied putti who hold the books of the Gospels. Above these, at the level of the feet and heads of Christ, the Virgin, and St. John, are their cloud-formed brothers, and these include gold-cloud putti behind God the Father. Raphael is only one among many artists to intermingle his angelic types, bringing about a juxtaposition of the putto, as a classical or classical-style cousin of the angel, with a diverse range of angels. While we see the heads and wings of the Cherubim and Seraphim fixed in their mandorla, we also see similar cherubic heads and wings within the architecture of the lowest cloud, as well as winged and full-bodied putti or spiritelli performing other actions. These are the bearers of the Gospels, and they also populate the two banks of the upper clouds. Above the lower, blue-grey bank, at the highest reaches of the fresco, the golden putti appear in front of gold stippling that resembles myriad falling stars.161 These putti form behind ray-like lines, ranked around the incised plaster. All of this gives an impression of depth and height beyond the picture surface. The tripartite division of the orders overall respects the indelible spirit of Pseudo-Dionysius. This division, which is the driving motif of the Dionysian structure, can be broken down in the fresco into Nine Orders of sorts, beginning with the Seraphim and Cherubim in the mandorla and the cloud putti. The six, full-bodied, colored angels are members of the lowest orders, by implication, who include the Archangels. But Raphael’s diagram here is more of the spirit than the letter, for he captures above all the sense of angel’s participation in the refraction of refulgent heavenly light as it descends. This notion is integral to Dionysius, and it lies at the heart of what would become

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the diagrammatic specificity of the painted cycles. In Raphael’s later works, such as his Madonna di Foligno (1511–1512) and Sistine Madonna (1513–1514) (where he combines cherubic heads and putti), the cloudangels are striking elements. The upward gazes of his earth-bound putti and their participation in the drama above them – as they holding a plaque, on the one hand, and mourning the deceased Julius II, on the other – read as signs of the artist’s unusual investment in the family of angels.162 In his contemporary designs for the Chigi Chapel (1513–1515), for the Augustinian church of Santa Maria del Popolo, Raphael continued to think about angelic nature, although here within a more strictly hierarchically ordered universe. The fictive oculus shows a vigorous God as prime mover before the open heavens. Underneath him, the vault appears to be broken away to reveal eight apertures, also in mosaic, behind which the angels direct the heavenly spheres. In the Stanza d’Eliodoro, Raphael’s angels are agents of liberation and punishment consistent with Scripture. In the Liberation of St. Peter (1514) (Fig. 56), the roseate angel at the center who frees the stillsleeping Apostle has wings; yet as he accompanies Peter out of the prison at the right, those wings are not as apparent, for in the testimony of Acts (12: 7–10): . . . an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.” And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, “Dress yourself and put on your sandals.” And he did so. And he said to him, “Wrap your mantle around you and follow me.” And he went out and followed him; he did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision.

Raphael has the last word here, for his is an essay in vision in the broadest sense: in light and shadow; in natural and supernatural illumination; and in the inadequacy of Peter’s full apprehension of his salvation. Neither the moon nor the torch can compete with the radiance of the Lord’s angel, who has confounded the Apostle in the end as to what had happened simultaneously as he has confirmed for Pope Julius II the sacred inheritance of Peter’s heirs. Likewise in the Expulsion of Heliodorus (1511–1512) (Fig. 57), only Heliodorus and his beholder in the room are privy to the sight of the wingless angels, beautiful young men, who rush in to execute God’s judgment on the

Raphael Transfigured

56. Raphael, Liberation of St. Peter (fresco) (1514), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican (Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

57. Raphael, Expulsion of Heliodorus (detail) (fresco) (1511–1512), Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

desecration of the temple. Fully embodied yet airborne, Raphael’s messengers are both fully present and fully absent, perfect solutions in their way to the anomaly of the invisible yet agile essence of their nature.

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58. Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Assumption of the Virgin (detail) (fresco) (1526–1530), Duomo, Parma (Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

Raphael’s heir as a painter of clouds with angels was Antonio Allegri, or Correggio (c. 1490–1534), who may have seen Raphael’s Vatican works before settling permanently in his native Parma.163 In his dome for San Giovanni Evangelista (1520) and later, in his dizzying Assumption of the Virgin (1526–1530) for the Duomo (Fig. 58), Correggio depicted “nebulous and infinite population[s] of cherubim, pulsating with the energy of light.”164 The angels and holy figures throng together as one crowd, playing instruments on the cloudy outer banks at the lower right of the Virgin and lifting her, arms outstretched in absorption as she rises toward the dematerializing light.

CHAPTER FIVE

CLOUDS AND THE FALL: REBELLION, SALVATION, AND REFORM

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caprarola For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.1

When Pope Clement VII (1523–1524) decided to augment the new ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a renovated altar wall on which Michelangelo would paint the Last Judgment (1536–1541) (see Fig. 23), the entrance wall at the chapel’s opposite end was destined to receive the subject of the Fall of the Rebel Angels. This idea had more than likely been current at the time of Julius II. Vasari remarked that Michelangelo had “long before” thought about pairing these themes. On the wall opposite the Last Judgment, Vasari said, “he wanted to have Lucifer cast down from heaven with the rebel angels.”2 He noted that a Sicilian artist executed a copy (now lost) of one of Michelangelo’s compositions for the Rebel Angels in the crossing of Rome’s Santissima Trinità dei Monti: “This work,” Vasari boasted, “possesses a certain terrifying power of surprise in the attitudes and groups of nudes raining down from heaven and converted into diverse forms of horrid and bizarre devils on reaching the ground. It is certainly a capricious fantasy.”3 On the Sistine Chapel’s vault, Michelangelo’s earlier Separation of Light from Darkness (c. 1511) initiates the narrative sequence of his nine Genesis subjects that extend to the entrance wall. From Late Antiquity onward,

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this moment in the Creation story was also regarded as the moment at which Lucifer and the rebel angels made their willful choice to part from their brothers and turn from God. That Fall, had it been realized on the wall opposite the Last Judgment, would have effected a fitting final chapter with respect to the theological implications of the frescoes in the chapel as a whole. It would have illustrated still further the influence of Augustine’s teleological scheme. In the Second Letter of Peter, the two subjects, the Fall of the Angels and the Last Judgment, are brought together. This is particularly appropriate in this location beside St. Peter’s basilica and his shrine, and within the chapel of the Apostle’s successors. The juxtaposition has its origins in 2 Peter 2–10 in relation to false prophets who destroy themselves: For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; And did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly . . . Then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, And especially those who walk according to the flesh in uncleanness and despise authority.

When the rebel angels fell to earth, they forfeited their right to eternal contemplation of God. Alternatively, according to Origen, they yet still possessed that chance, according to their will, to redeem themselves on earth and ascend to heaven. In any event, the deeper meaning of both the angelic fall and the human soul’s final judgment on the last day centers on the motions of the will and its capacity to change destiny, including the soul’s entry into heaven. Both themes treat the dark side of heaven that was first manifest in the Fall of the Angels at the beginning of time.4 The angel’s choice and consequent fall answered the question, from Augustine’s point of view, of how there can be evil in a world that, since it was made by God, had to be wholly good. The mutability of God’s creatures and God’s gift of choice were decisive. The angel of the prophet, Zechariah, who is represented over the original entrance wall opposite the altar, adds his voice, by association, to these redemptive notions. This messenger shared with Zechariah a premonition of Jerusalem’s liberation (Zec. 1: 7–17).

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

The fateful outcome of choice seems to be the sovereign theme of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment wherein the angel at the lower center, reading from the Book of Life, affirms the centrality of human actions on earth in determining the experience of the afterlife. The artist’s biographer, Ascanio Condivi, understood this message for he noted of the fresco that: “everyone reads and recognizes his past life, having almost to judge himself.”5 At the upper left and right, angels also display the instruments of the Passion. As a visual accompaniment to the sacrifice of the Mass, the Last Judgment reiterates the promise of the Resurrection prefigured by Jonah above and celebrated in the liturgy.6 In the mid-sixteenth-century context of discourse about the economies of will and grace, humankind’s choices weighed in the balance relative to the journey of the soul. The character of the afterlife was at stake. When, in 1564, the theorist, Giovanni Andrea Gilio, considered the nature of the body that the elect might have after resurrection, he speculated that they would retain only their beautiful parts. When he evaluated the mistakes of contemporary painters, and particularly the orthodoxy of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which he found wanting, the corporeality of the soul came into play. In Gilio’s fictional dialogue, a theologian defers to St. Paul in answer to the proposition that souls do not inhabit space: “But we are not talking just about souls but about souls and bodies, and although the bodies will be glorified, they will nonetheless certainly occupy space.”7 How, then, to show, by way of the body, the difference between the blessed and the damned, and between angels and demons? In Michelangelo’s painting, the struggle for the spiritual body among the Devil’s minions and God’s ministers takes on a special resonance. There is relatively little distinction among the bodily forms, whether spirit or corporeal, whether good or evil. The crux of the matter is choice, and the wrong choice brings anguish. For religious reformers in these decades, Paul’s teachings about the Resurrection took on new relevance, and Michelangelo and his patrons offered their response.8 Before the Second Coming, Christ’s Resurrection was the guarantee of the resurrection of souls. Instead of a judging Christ, Michelangelo’s figure is choreographing an undulating resurrection, one that rises and falls according to the actions of each spirit and each soul. His composition supplies an answer, perhaps, to the hopeful Pauline message: “For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are

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not of the night or of darkness . . . for God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 4–5).9 On the final day, “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command . . . and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” Those clouds and that air through which Christ descends are not only the physical reaches of the spheres above the earth, rendered by Michelangelo as a vast, blue field. They are also the dwelling places of all spirits whose worlds collide with those of humankind at the Second Coming. Demons, as extensions of the Devil, and angels are caught up together in the last, great struggle. Like their angelic siblings, demons have eternal life. Since ancient times and through Late Antiquity, they were recognized as devious, quick, and endowed with supernatural vision. As fallen angels in their later, Judeo-Christian natures, demons were the enemies of mortal happiness.10 In the poetic encapsulation of Peter Brown, demons were sent into “the turbulence of the lower air, below the moon”; there, “these condemned prisoners, awaiting sentence in the Last Judgment, were always ready to swoop, like birds, upon the broken fragments of a frail and dissident humanity . . . men got the demons they deserved.”11 efh

When Michelangelo had set to work in earnest on the altar wall in the 1530s, the climate of religious reform in Europe urged acknowledgment from Rome. The choice of the Fall of the Angels opposite the Last Judgment complemented these currents. Angels were a point of dispute. In September 1530, in Coburg, Luther himself had preached a Michaelmas sermon that marked a long life of reflection on the truth of angels. By this time, he had reached a position of weary skepticism about popular reports of angelic apparitions, but he allowed that the apparitions were possible. He thought, however, that the angels truly worked in secret. Arguing against the “fables” and “errors” of the Middle Ages, he maintained that the feast of St. Michael, which was traditionally the day to honor both the Archangel’s deeds and those of his company, was an opportunity not so much to focus on Michael as to praise God and the labors of all his angels.12 As he grew older, Luther became

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

increasingly strict in his views so that, from about 1535 on, he claimed, as we have noted, that he had often prayed that he would not encounter “visions, dreams or angels.”13 He devoted, however, more than four-fifths of his sermon in Coburg to the Devil – whom his audience would have identified as the fallen Lucifer – as well as to the Devil’s consort. Even more striking, perhaps, he adopted an “intimate tone”: the Devil dwells, he said, “closer than the shirt on our body.”14 His sermon coincided with the meetings of the imperial diet at Augsburg, to which he was opposed. From a pessimistic perspective, the reformer catalogued the sufferings that the Devil furtively set upon humankind: sexual incontinence, pestilence, famine, war, and murder.15 But the good angels, he said, also work undetected and they prove stronger. Citing the Gospel text for the feast day (Matt. 18: 10), “That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven,” Luther pointed out that an angel’s vision of the divine proves more powerful than the work of the Devil and his minions. “Now,” he said, “when you see that a stable, a village, a house still stands, that is a sign that the angels protect us, and that the devil has not been able to wrench these things away.”16 In his homily, Luther touched on the operations of sight: the Devil and his company, like the angels, are unseen. The sight of God, however, empowers the good angels just as the human regard for earthly things affirms the good angel’s vigilance. This optical conundrum, that the act of seeing proves the existence of ineffable beings, lies at the heart of medieval and Early Modern angelology. This paradox also lies at the heart of the artist’s obligation. Luther urged attention to the teachings of the Bible even though, in this respect, his was a difficult request. The scriptural identity of the fallen angels, these dark messengers, is piecemeal at best, devolving mainly to two different passages in Revelation, and to passages in Ezekiel and Isaiah that refer to Lucifer.17 Lucifer is a controversial being. As the “morning star” of Isaiah (14: 12–16), his name and “morning star” were often taken to be synonymous: “How you have fallen from heaven,” reads Isaiah, “O morning star, son of the dawn! / You have been cast down to the earth, / you who once laid low the nations! / You said in your heart, / ‘I will ascend to heaven; / I will raise my throne / above the stars of God.’” In the Latin Vulgate rendering and, following it, in sixteenth-century Bibles, the

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Hebrew, helel (“Shining One”) becomes Lucifer. Luther’s German Bible of 1534 has “morgen stern” at Isaiah 14: 12, and in his lectures on this verse, he was clear: the Hebrew word “denotes the morning star,” he said, “called Lucifer and the son of the Dawn.” Likewise, the reason for the Fall lies in the following verses in Isaiah 14 (13–14): “‘I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” A similar fall is referred to in Ezekiel (28: 12–17): “You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you.” Subsequently, because of the “cherub’s” great beauty, his heart grew proud and his wisdom corrupted. God threw him to earth. Pride was the source of Lucifer’s downfall. Christ in heaven witnessed this punishment before his Incarnation for, as Luke tells it, Christ “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10: 18). The earliest source for the Fall of the Rebel Angels as a fully developed theme, however, is the Jewish apocalyptic Book of Enoch of c. 200 B.C.E. The rebel angels’ identity from the beginning is also bound up with the character of will. In the later Hebrew Bible, in Kings (1 Kings 22: 19–22) and in Job (1: 6–12; 2: 1–7), angels either perform God’s will or they are independent, headstrong adversaries. In Genesis (6: 1–4), further, we read in the narrative of the Flood about the contrast between the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men”: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.” The Book of Enoch constitutes a fascinating meditation on these texts, as well as a brilliant subject in its own right.18 For the likes of Pico della Mirandola, as for later scholars well into modern times, the Book of Enoch promised secrets and magical revelation. Genesis tells us only that Enoch, the son of Jared and father of Methuselah, lived before the Flood and that he “walked with God” (5: 18–24). When he died, his death occurred in an exceptional way: “. . . he was not, for God took him” (5: 24).19 In contrast to this circumspect biography, and from as early as the Second Temple Period (536 B.C.E.–70 C.E.), Enoch possessed a reputation as a heavenly traveler and visionary. He intercedes for wicked angels and he authors books of visions and teachings for future generations.20 His first and most influential book is the Book of the Watchers (or Fallen Angels), known as 1 Enoch. This text had a mixed reception after early

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

success. It was rejected by the Rabbinic movement but accepted by Early Christians. Church leaders subsequently repressed the work after which it was believed lost to the West. This loss endowed Enoch with mystique: the mystique of “lost books and secret scrolls, wisdom suppressed and writings forgotten.”21 Pico claimed to have bought such a book for a handsome sum, although his humanist friend, Johannes Reuchlin, chuckled.22 Later, John Dee tried to “channel” Enoch’s secrets. Like Pico and Christian Kabbalists, in general, Dee was aware that Early Christian and Jewish mystical texts such as the Zohar referred to Enoch’s books. Enough extracts from the Book of the Watchers survived in Syriac Christianity and Byzantium such that when, in 1606, the historian Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) published sections of a ninth-century text by the Byzantine churchman, George Syncellus, readers noted that George quoted “from the first book of Enoch concerning the Watchers.”23 Scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not accept that this “book of Enoch” dated to antediluvian times. They did recognize it, however, as the source for dispersed references to the visionary’s prophecies about the fallen angels in the New Testament, as well as in Early Christian writings such as Augustine’s. Until 1773, however, with the Western rediscovery of the Book of the Watchers and other early Enochic pseudepigrapha, there were essentially only rumors about the existence of these works in Ethiopia and about their preservation.24 In Chapter 6 of 1 Enoch, the angels are called children of heaven. They lust after the daughters of men. In the days of Jared, two hundred of their number, including Azazel, descended to Mount Hermon. The angels took wives on earth and from this union a race of giants was born.25 The angels disseminated useful knowledge to humankind for they instructed women in charms, magic, and botanical lore, and men on the manufacture of weapons and other useful arts. But from this intermingling came anarchy and violence, and as men lay dying, they uttered cries that were heard in heaven. The four major archangels, Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel, channeled those cries to God, alerting him to the deeds of their brethren below. God dispatched Uriel, who warned Noah of the approaching Flood and told him how to survive it. God also told Raphael to bind Azazel and cast him out into a dark place in the desert, covering him with rocks. Michael bound Azazel’s companions in the same way. There, Azazel was to stay until the Day of Judgment when

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he would be cast into the fire. In their earthly prison in the valleys, the angels would abide for seventy generations, waiting until “the judgment that is for ever and ever is consummated.”26 Then they will be hurled into the abyss of fire to remain there in eternity. Michael eradicated the offspring of the Watchers (the rebel angels) as well as the rebels themselves since they had both wronged humankind. The giants had also given birth to evil spirits “who dwell on the earth.” These issued from the giants’ bodies “because they [the giants] are born from men, and from the holy Watchers.” This implies either that these malign spirits – the “grandchildren” of mortals and Fallen Angels – may have emanated from the giants when they died or that the spirits of the giants after death constituted an evil force.27 Although the fallen angels are punished before the Last Judgment as well as during it, these demonic offspring are punished only at the final reckoning. They were free, then, to pursue their ways against humankind“because they have proceeded from them.” This is an interesting point for Michelangelo’s demons since, following Enoch, the final judgment is the single moment of punishment for a species of spirit who is of mixed, part-human descent.28 For the Renaissance, as for the Middle Ages, Enoch assumed a mysterious and alluring profile. The associations brought to mind by his name and by mention of the rebel angels were not limited to Pico’s learned, literary circle or to his censors. Enoch and the angels had accrued an aura of their own. In his work on the Kabbalah, Pico mentions the angel, Azazel, whose name otherwise occurs in only one biblical passage, in Leviticus (16: 7–28), when the Lord gives Moses instructions for the Day of Atonement. Aaron must “cast lots upon two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Aza’zel.” Azazel’s goat is intended for atonement.29 In the Book of Enoch, Azazel has a major role as the leader of the rebel angels, and his teachings to humankind include magical incantations and charms. In the foundational Kabbalist text, the Zohar, the Almighty expels two additional rebellious angels, Uzza and Azael, for querying the very creation of humankind. These two took on bodies, had sex with women, and taught “magic, witchcraft, and sorcery.”30 Pico’s Kabbalism comes into play again here. As he noted in one of his famous, censored Conclusiones of the 1480s, should a Kabbalist make a mistake in his work, the demon, Azazel, might devour him through the “Property of Judgment.” Further, for Pico, in an Origenist vein, a human person who

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

dies to the sensible world might be reborn in the intelligible one as an angel; this is just as the Kabbalists say that Enoch was changed into “Metatron, an angel of divinity.”31 Pico, then, in drawing on both the Bible and the Kabbalah, devised a set of themes that advanced the portrayal of the rebel angels as ancient, potent, and vengeful beings, capable not only of ontological transformation and human, sensual experience, but also of wielding powerful magic. Pico and his readers would likely have known more popular vehicles for propagating the angelic intersections of Judaism and Christianity in the visual culture of their times. One of these was the Sefer Raziel, a guidebook to angel magic that had been available in Latin since the thirteenth century. The Sefer Raziel included a well-known childbirth talisman. In their combinations of number, word, and geometry, such powerful visual forms invoked the angel’s protective action on behalf of humankind.32 Pico seems to have organized the number of his Conclusiones to conform to the mystical numerology of the Kabbalah so that even his writings, in their own way, were intended to operate as an angelic talisman, repelling Azazel and summoning his worthy opponent, Metatron, the angel of ecstatic death.33 In Pico’s tenth Kabbalist Conclusion, Metatron assumes a dizzying array of identities: “Pallas by Orpheus, Paternal Mind by Zaroaster, Son of God by Mercury, Wisdom by Pythagoras, Intelligible Sphere by Parmenides.” He is chief of angels and a foe of Samael, or Satan, as well as of his commander-in-chief, Azazel.34 At first, Pico’s angelology might seem to take us far from the subject of the Fall of the Angels, let alone the angel’s place in Italy’s reform culture of the sixteenth century. Yet the childbirth talisman reminds us of the steady presence of the fallen angels and – however allusively, however secretly – of Enoch’s terrifying cast and their colleagues in the Kabbalah. In the Fall of the Rebel Angels, as taught in the Jewish apocryphal and apocalyptic literature, angelology and demonology are also inextricably bound. It is essentially here, in these teachings, that the Fall has its fullest exposition.35 efh

For reasons of its esoteric and heterodox associations, the Fall of the Rebel Angels is relatively rare in Italian art, although it has a long Byzantine tradition.36 From the fifteenth century onward, northern artists produced more versions of the subject than their Italian peers,

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59. Limbourg Brothers, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Très Riches Heures (illumination on vellum) (c. 1416) (290 × 210 mm) (Musée Condé, Chantilly, MS. 65, fol. 64v) (Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda) (Photo credit: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

in both manuscript illuminations and larger works. In their Très Riches Heures, the Limbourg brothers depicted the angel’s vertiginous descent (Fig. 59), with God seated outside the border of the page, surrounded by red Seraphim and blue Cherubim, and flanked by golden choir stalls that reveal the truancy of some occupants. These rebel angels are tilting downwards, prodded like coals in a fire by a small battalion of archangels as they cascade to earth. When they hit the ground beside Lucifer, their leader, they explode into flames.37 By the Limbourgs’ day, Lucifer was understood to have become Satan on impact.38 Most well-known among the Michael and Lucifer type, perhaps, is Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

60. Albrecht Dürer, The Revelation of St. John: 11. St. Michael Fighting the Dragon (woodcut) (1498) (41.6 × 28.6 cm) (Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1980.45.456.rr) (Photo credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

1498 of St. Michael and the dragon (Fig. 60). This illustrates Revelation 12: 7–9, which treats the defeat of Satan (or the Devil), as a dragon, and his being thrown down with his angels, but without mention of other details such as the “bottomless pit.” By the sixteenth century, artists commonly elided the two parts of Revelation, as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder would do.

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61. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on oak) (1562) (117 × 162 cm) (Musée d’Art Ancien, Musée Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) (Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

In Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) (Fig. 61), Michael, at the center, and nine of his company battle the angels who are already demons, issuing in a squirming torrent from a high, radiant sphere.39 The several crowned heads of the apocalyptic dragon beast emerge from the fray below Michael, who is on axis with a bloated toad in the central foreground. This is a signifier for the Devil; toads were believed to be at the roots of pestilence.40 But it is Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), more than any other Early Modern artist, who understood the moral resonance of sin among God’s creation and the contested theological implications of human fleshliness. He took the Fall still further, adumbrating not only Scripture but also the weight of its exegesis. In the side panels for his dismembered triptych sometimes identified as The World Before the Flood, he represented the Apocalypse by Fire or Fall of the Rebel Angels (Fig. 62) and Noah’s Ark After the Flood. When, according to Augustine, “God created the heavens,” he also created spiritual beings such that “let there be light and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3) refers to the creation of angels simultaneously with the creation of light. It was at the moment of light’s creation that the rebel angels chose to turn away, to plummet,

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

62. Hieronymus Bosch, Apocalypse by Fire or Fall of the Rebel Angels (obverse) (oil on panel) (1500–1504) (69 × 35 cm) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. No. St. 27) (Photo credit: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; loan: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Foundation)

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then, into the dark: “the two different societies of angels,” Augustine said, are “not unfitly termed light and darkness” (City of God 11, 33).41 Breugel and Bosch understood this light-dark opposition, and Bosch understood, as Augustine and others also did, that the Devil did not sin when he was first made but that it was pride that caused his sinning.42 The Devil foreknew before he fell that other angels would follow, and that, “without the light of truth, they would abide in the darkness of pride” (City of God 11, 19; 11, 32). Indeed, medieval mystics believed that the most miserable of eternal punishments imaginable was to be deprived forever of the sight of God. With his fall, too, the Devil became the “mockery” of God’s angels and the butt of jokes (City of God 15, 11, 12). In Bosch’s Apocalypse by Fire, the skies burn above a smoldering earth and demonic forms descend unopposed to the ground. The juxtaposition of this scene with that of Noah’s Ark after the Flood has its origins in that same letter of Peter in relation to false prophets. Peter had singled out lust and defiance – the sins of Adam and Eve. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and committing the great sin, like Lucifer, of first knowing something of the ways of goodness and then turning from them, the first couple had to endure the fires of the last days. Twice, Bosch shows the Fall of the Rebel Angels more explicitly above the Garden of Eden; thus, the degraded world of later generations is foretold. One fall – the angels’ – leads to another – that of humankind. In a panel for his Haywain triptych, God sits within a light rimmed by Seraphim and Cherubim who take arms against their falling brethren; these morph into frogs and insects as they fall. In his Last Judgment triptych (Fig. 63), the fight is truly on, and above Eden, a black and white melée ensues, with the lighter angels bearing cross-shaped lances or staffs and swords and the rebels forming black wings as if before our eyes. In both paintings, an angel equipped with a firey sword lunges after the fallen pair, as if to affirm the consequences of the tumbling disaster above. efh

Michelangelo was not entirely alone, however, in his selection of the rebel angels theme, particularly given its potential elision with the storied contest between Lucifer and St. Michael. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Carmelite friars of the convent of San Niccolò al

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

63. Hieronymus Bosch, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail from Garden of Eden, left shutter of Last Judgment altarpiece) (oil on panel) (1505–1508) (147 × 45 cm) (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna) (Photo credit: Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Carmine in Siena commissioned a large panel “of Saint Michael subduing Lucifer.” In this, they were making a distinctive request. “Being a man of ideas,” as Vasari observed of the artist, the local painter, Domenico Beccafumi:

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he [Beccafumi] thought of a new treatment of this theme to prove his ability. Thus he began a shower of nude figures, representing Lucifer and his followers driven out of heaven, though they were rather confused owing to the labour he bestowed on them (Plate XXXI). The picture remained unfinished, and after Domenico’s death it was taken to a room near the high altar at the top of the stairs in the great hospital [Santa Maria della Scala], where it may still be seen. It is remarkable for some nude figures finely foreshortened. In the Carmine, where it was to have gone, another [also by Beccafumi] was placed representing God upon the clouds, surrounded by angels (Plate XXXII). In the middle is Saint Michael in armour, pointing as he flies to Lucifer, who is driven to the centre of the earth amid burning walls, falling rocks and a flaming lake, with angels in various postures and nude figures swimming about and suffering torment, the whole done with such style and grace that the place seems illuminated by the fire.43

Vasari seems right in many respects. Beccafumi’s first attempt (c. 1524) (now in Siena’s Pinacoteca) does register at first as confusing: three attenuated, nude figures dominate the lower regions while other, more abbreviated bodies lurk in the shadows beside an impenetrable tangle of animal forms. In the upper part of the panel, Michael is dominant, raising his sword over the vanquished rebels. Dressed in a fantasy of antique armor, he looks upward to a small, cloudy vision of God who is represented in adept foreshortening. In Beccafumi’s second version of c. 1528, however, a different order prevails. A full, red-mantled figure of God effects his judgment with a confidant arm. He is flanked by angels who are arrayed more stably above the gloomy caverns and sulphurous fires at ground level. We sense here sharper, more tactile edges of forms and clearer recession, as well as a pronounced colorism: from red in God to gilded yellow in Michael, and slashes of blue and pale pink. Lucifer below, as the Devil, is all gaping mouth and open claw, unmistakable and monstrous abbreviations for the torments of hell. In his panels – both of which are over eleven feet high – Beccafumi offers us meditations on a sensational theme and on stylistic selfconsciousness. Beccafumi’s second, accepted altarpiece is not only a deft accommodation of the friars’ requirements, however, nor simply an artistically inventive yet orthodox diagram of divine retribution. Beccafumi is also wrestling mightily here with bodies and angels,

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

endeavoring to resolve a question of identity – moral as well as physical – by way of artful effect and visual quotation. When his angels fall to earth, they become codes for an anxious humanity and these by way of the very stuff of his materials, his paint. The angels become present and absent both at once; truth and allegory at one and the same time. Vasari tells us that Beccafumi abandoned the first panel because the nude figures of Lucifer and his followers “were rather confused owing to the labour he bestowed on them.” This means, as most interpreters have deduced, that despite being “a man of ideas,” the artist did not succeed in his “new treatment” “to prove his ability,” to exhibit his aesthetic prowess. Directed by his patrons, if we believe Vasari, to the passage from Revelation (20: 1–3) in which a vision of an angel overthrows Satan as a dragon and imprisons him in a bottomless pit, the artist failed in his first attempt to adequately and decorously adhere to the text – in the “confusion” of his design and possibly also in the excess of nudity among his figures.44 None other than the Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola, had decried the apparent indecency of religious art in the fifteenth century. For similar reasons of decorum, as modern critics have concluded, Beccafumi partially covered every angel in his second panel and more clearly demarcated the composition’s architecture, notably the boundaries of heaven and hell.45 He radically altered and synchronized the positions and actions of God and his agent, Michael, so that where there were vacuums below a wispy God, now the Almighty’s robust, full figure dominates the upper third of the panel. In this, the artist called upon some of his most adept technical abilities – Vasari’s “style and grace” – including a kind of prismatic lighting effect and otherworldly color. Perhaps, as has been proposed, the friars needed not only a more legible organization but also a God fully “in control.”46 There was a Sienese precedent for rendering the Fall of the Rebel Angels as a vertical, hierarchically ordered composition (Fig. 64), as in a small panel from the 1340s, attributed to Simone Martini.47 Beccafumi and his patrons may also have seen northern European imagery by way of the book arts and prints such as Dürer’s, particularly given Siena’s longstanding role as a trading gateway and pilgrimage rest-stop between the peninsula and the North. By the sixteenth century, the two parts of Revelation were commonly elided, as we have noted, and Beccafumi conforms to this tradition, as well, condensing his pictorial framework

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64. Master of the Rebel Angels (Simone Martini?), Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (panel transferred to canvas) (1340s) (64.2 × 29.0 cm) (Louvre) (Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

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along the same lines as Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. Moreover, he seized on the question of angels’ carnate/incarnate selves and in relation to human frailty and error. His angels, languishing anxiously in hell, are unmistakably and unsettlingly human, and all the more so for the fact that some, notably in the middle regions of the first panel, have bat wings and claws. Our viewpoint is at eye-level; we are in the company of these damned forms, literally forced up to their chests and flailing arms. We must crane upwards, like the fallen angels. Like them, as in the words of Voragine, we must look up to “see the glory they have lost.”48 This still leaves, however, the question of the two panels and Beccafumi’s shift from full, naked figures to partially covered half forms. Siena’s deeply unsettled civic climate in the 1520s surely had its part to play. At the Battle of Camollia in 1526, the Sienese ousted the Medici and their allies from their position of dominance in the city’s government. With the Sack of Rome in 1527, the city’s political regime faced a new set of challenges.49 The Sienese viewed their military victory as miraculous, and this triumph appeared to be confirmed by events in Rome, and by the expulsion there of Pope Clement VII de’ Medici by the imperial forces of Charles V. In the summer of 1527, Siena’s populace staged their own rebellion, sacking the residences of members of the ruling Noveschi and forming a reconfigured and conservative coalition government.50 Within the international context of debate about Catholic reform, the Carmelites may have been encouraged, as well, to reconsider the decorum of the objects within their conventual church. The authenticity and authority of the saints relative to the communion of the faithful was at stake and, not least, the most inclusive definition of hierarchy. These currents must have inflected the friars’ unusual decision – if theirs it was – to install the commanding form of God the Father where, in this subject, he conventionally did not conspicuously appear.51 Beccafumi’s stylistic experimentation also has its part to play in this period of his artistic maturity. His debt to works he had seen in Rome, and to Raphael and Michelangelo, in particular, is evident in his bold colorism and in his choice of figural language. St. Michael, as a longstanding and fearsome defender of Christian orthodoxy, enjoyed a revival in the second decade of the sixteenth century, as Luther and his northern colleagues mounted their critique of the Church. Michael could be an effective combatant on behalf of Catholicism. He is the

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only angel in the West to have his own feast day, and it is a significant one, too, in that Michaelmas is the day in the agricultural year when accounts are tallied. Raphael’s second St. Michael subject, which he painted at the behest of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leo X, and which was sent as a gift to Francis I in 1518, has long been regarded as a plaidoyer for solidarity against Protestantism.52 Yet much of the answer to the question of Beccafumi’s rejected panel must lie with the controversial character of the Fall of the Angels itself, and its ancient and variant traditions in Judaism and Christianity. The Fall touches, further, not only on a definition of evil, but also on the long shadow of dualism: that is, within a Judeo-Christian context, on heretical themes pertaining to a self-created evil principle in combat with a benevolent one. Augustine had been attracted to one such kind of radical dualism, that of the Manichees, before his conversion. In the medieval era, the Cathar heresy was condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.53 In the end, the rebel angels’ actions have always been bound to the idea of will. Long after Enoch, around the beginning of the third century C.E., Origen would posit the notion that human souls originated among the angels, specifically among those of the heavenly hierarchy who made a fateful choice at the moment of Lucifer’s dissent. Exercising their will, these angels chose neither to join Lucifer nor remain with God. Rather, they were disobedient and adopted a neutral position, eventually coming to earth where they earned the opportunity, through their election of good behavior, to ascend to heaven as redeemed souls.54 There, they would find their seats in the celestial bleachers, occupying the empty seats left by the forever-departed rebel angels. We know that Beccafumi was thinking of this subject, and not simply of the battle between Lucifer and Michael, from one overlooked detail appearing only in his first panel, namely, the very faint but unmistakable outline of the rows of those heavenly ledges behind the angels to the right of Michael. In fact, these rather resemble the angels’ stalls in another Tuscan context: the imagery accompanying Dante’s Commedia (see Fig. 10). Among the prints for Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary, the artist depicts the Empyrean as containing just such a ring of heavenly seats.55 This feature reminds us of the reinvention of Origen’s ideas among Tuscan intellectuals, and particularly of Matteo Palmieri’s Città di Vita, itself a brilliant homage to Dante’s work. That the Council of

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

Florence was drawn to condemn Origen in 1439, after long-standing, if intermittent contestation of his theological propositions, signals the enduring vitality of his views. When Vasari, then, with some ingenuousness, speaks of the “style and grace” of Beccafumi’s second panel, the panel that made its way into the church, he was likely responding not just to the clarity of the second design and to the virtuosic language of its technique. In both works, he would have seen, as well – and responded to – quotations from the artist’s sixteenth-century peers. Beccafumi consciously drew from scenes of righteous retribution, such as Raphael’s St. Michael and Michelangelo’s Punishment of Haman (1511) from the Sistine Ceiling.56 These tributes Vasari likely appreciated, along with the richer color scheme of the second panel, which draws attention more actively to the artifice and imitation of the artist. But the excessive “labor” of Beccafumi that led to the “confusion” in the first panel was also an indelible mark of the ambiguous status of those fallen angels themselves, angels who bear the marks of mortal terror and bodily extremis. In the first version, it is not clear who is descending and who is ascending, in fact, who is doing what. An intriguing exchange in the lower center indicates perhaps the artist’s ambivalence as to the identity of the angel, Lucifer, himself, and his uncertainty as to Lucifer’s relation to Satan. A standing male figure, older and clothed, bends over an angel with dark wings and attempts to lift him up. The exchange here is tender, as father to son or as lover to lover. Yet Satan as a monster is also here, in the painting, for above these two is a squirming hybrid octopus-scorpion-bat creature. He differs from the more traditional, winged dragon-type of the second panel. The naked figures, especially those in the foreground, have not exploded into fire, as in earlier Falls, so much as into materiality itself.57 As if to bear this out, the paint pulls away in places from the panel. Although these figures seem to struggle in their contortions against the limits of their mortal being, and although they look mournfully upward from whence they came, we are in no doubt either of their suffering or of their humanity. To fall is to become sensate and vulnerable to feeling. In this, the trauma of the angel’s fall leads not to an end but to a kind of beginning, to an iconography of human creation in which our perception of bodily travail leads to an interrogation of the powers of the body

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itself. And although the Carmelites would ultimately install another panel in their Sienese church, their own distinctive culture of contemplation might perhaps have been better answered in this unfinished first Fall. There, they would have been directed forever to gaze upon the unresolved, shivering boundaries of persons and angels, of grace and choice, flesh and not flesh. efh

In the later sixteenth century, the rebel angels gained in popularity both among private patrons and among the religious orders, notably the Jesuits. At Caprarola, about thirty miles north of Rome, the rebel angels appeared within a domestic context, on the walls of a sumptuous residence for a prince of the Church. In about 1555, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese set about planning for the construction of his villa, which lay within the confines of his family’s property holdings.58 The Villa Farnese was designed by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, who was the churchman’s favorite architect, and it is a grandiose expression of Alessandro’s secular patronage. He intended his retreat to function as a base from which to hunt and entertain, as well as a means by which to lay claim in a conspicuous way to the family’s territories.59 In 1561, the artist, Taddeo Zuccari, began supervising the decoration of the interior, following an esoteric program given him by his patron. Taddeo died suddenly, however, and in September 1566, he was succeeded by his brother, Federico (c. 1540–1609), who had been a member of his workshop.60 Beginning work in the palatine chapel, Taddeo had executed first an altarpiece and then a fresco of the Dead Christ with Angels, in which four youths, two with large, burning tapers, flank the body of Christ while an older man at the rear, presumably Joseph of Arimathea, lifts the body from behind. After Federico came to quarrel with their patron, the artist, Jacopo Bertoja, from Parma, took up the project, perhaps as early as March 1568.61 In the private rooms of the villa’s Winter apartment, on the piano nobile, Bertoja depicted schemes for the bedroom, or Stanza dei Sogni (Room of Dreams), the study, or Stanza della Penitenza (Room of Penitence), and the Stanza dei Giudizi (Room of the Judgments). In contrast to the schemes of the Summer apartment, which were largely secular, the private rooms in the Winter quarters were devoted to religious themes.62 Nevertheless, the two apartments’ programs generally

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Rome, Siena, and Caparola

mirror one another so that where, in the Summer apartments, there was a Camera dell’Aurora dedicated to night and sleep, so, in the Sala dei Sogni, the imagery focused on biblical dreams, including Jacob’s ladder.63 Bertoja’s last task, before leaving Cardinal Farnese’s employ in the late summer of 1572, was to decorate the first of the public rooms of the apartment, the Sala degli Angeli, for which he completed the painting of the vault. This is the only public room at Caprarola given over to religious subject matter.64 That being said, however, there is a decidedly luxurious, secular cast to the space. After Bertoja, work in the Sala degli Angeli was suspended until the Tuscan, Giovanni de’ Vecchi, took over. The artist, Raffaellino da Reggio, worked with him briefly, until a jealous de’ Vecchi reportedly expelled him from the villa. Raffaellino produced a fresco of Tobias and the Angel that joins a series of standing angels along the walls.65 Other subjects in the room, located between the standing angels, include Habbukuk rescuing Daniel from the lion’s den and the vision of the angel, Michael, above Hadrian’s tomb. Bertoja’s masterpiece is his vault fresco of the Fall of the Rebel Angels.66 Here, a grandiose circular field recedes upward to the highest heaven; around its circumference the angels are embattled (Fig. 65). This image

65. Jacopo Bertoja, Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) (fresco), Sala degli Angeli, Villa Farnese, Caprarola (Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

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of the celestial spheres, in its impression of circular rotation, recalls the vault of the oratory of the hospital of SS. Annunziata at Riofreddo, also in Lazio, and approximately eighty miles south east from Caprarola. Here, however, we see an angelic spectacle within a domestic, if palatial context. This angelic motif is destined for the purview of a zealous and ambitious patron, and his visitors might have admired, if not trembled perhaps at, this vision of divine contest. St. Michael is visible at the outer rim in bright armor, while the naked forms of both species of angels wrestle with one another among the banks of clouds. The angels at the edges give way to younger angels or putti as the cloudy banks recede upward; these in turn give way to wreaths of fiery Seraphim around an angel-oculus. The rebel angels, who are slightly darker in hue, sport horns, tails, and pointed ears, and several of them hold elaborate shields. Others, alone, look mournfully downward from the edges of the frame in a melancholy echo of Andrea Mantegna’s jovial spectators in the vault of the Camera Picta in Mantua’s ducal palace. In some cases, the wrestling couples are indistinguishable as to their type, lending the combat a tragic, human aspect. This indeterminacy and emphasis on the body demonstrates Bertoja’s debt to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which was completed not long beforehand, and it also suggests, perhaps, the anguished forms of Giulio Romano’s Fall of the Giants from the 1530s in Mantua’s Palazzo del Tè. Like Federico II Gonzaga, Alessandro proves himself to be not only an erudite and imaginative host, but also a politically minded and prepossessing statesman. As a cardinal and prince of the Church, he may have felt impelled to call upon the heavenly hierarchies, rather than the giants and gods of Greco-Roman myth, as his standard bearers and henchmen. Fabio Arditio, a Seicento contemporary, tried to make sense of the iconography by linking it to that of the palace’s Anticamera del Concilio: The proportion which the pictures of this antechamber [of the Angels] have in relation to those of the other [antechamber, i.e., of the Council] can be easily understood, because the creation of cardinals who would succeed to the pontificate, which Paul III made in the other room, the introduction of peace between two such great monarchs as Charles V and King Francis, the celebration of the Holy Council, the separation of the heretics from the bosom of the Holy Church, the pardoning of

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those who repent of the error they have committed, what else are these than angelic actions?67

This justification seems a little forced.68 Nonetheless, Arditio conveys, perhaps, a critical aspect of the angelology of the Cinquecento. He deduces that the angels, who are well-matched with their foes in active combat, rather than enduring judgment and expulsion, might serve a number of polemical purposes. In grouping together such a range of actions keyed to the fortunes of the Counter-Reformation Church, he illuminates new readings of the angels, and a kind of coming to earth.

Demons and Artists From the mid-sixteenth century on, rebel spirits, fallen angels, and demonic beings, in general, seem to enter more conspicuously into the realms of Italian intellectual culture and the visual arts. Raphael’s possessed boy in his Transfiguration marks a watershed moment in the resurgence of the demonic, or of the idea of the demonic. By the time of the Council of Trent, portrayals of the saints and their miracles also prominently included demons. According to a later biographer of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), his name alone could be anathema to these spirits. In one of Ignatius’s most ambitious portraits, that by Peter Paul Rubens of c. 1618 for the Jesuit church of Antwerp (now Vienna), the future saint is shown raising his hand while two possessed persons, a man who has fallen and a falling woman, flail their limbs. Above them, in the air, the exorcised demons literally turn tail.69 Yet Ignatius was not, like Benedict, especially known as an exorcist even though demons had occasion to taunt him. Rubens’s inclusion of them here is striking. The subjective impact of the figures, much like that of Raphael’s possessed boy, relies on the contrast between robust bodies, on the one hand, and lack of control, on the other. Like Raphael’s boy, the unseen spirits horrify by means of their occupation of the familiar. In this case, the human physiques are overly muscular and beautiful.70 Rubens’s possessed might be compared to images such as Beccafumi’s in which the horror of the demonic is expressed through the body’s incapacity and contortion – its “discomposition” – and particularly through its inversion.71

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The pictorial inversion of the rebel angels’ bodies has its own tradition. In a twelfth-century manuscript of the Hortus deliciarum, the rebellion in heaven, as told in Isaiah 14 and Revelation 12, is shown on a page divided in half. In the upper half, Lucifer stands on a small mountain behind a banner held by flanking angels that displays the text from Isaiah (14: 13) (“In caelum conscendam”; “I will ascend to heaven”).72 Below them, in the lower half of the page, Lucifer has fallen. He has lost his wings, his hair is unkempt, his teeth are bared, and he has grown claws. St. Michael and his two assistants push Lucifer and his fellows down with long tridents. Lucifer’s head and body are almost completely upside down, but even the bodies of his fallen comrades curl upwards and downwards in their tumbling descent, their heads awkwardly close to the lower corners of the page. In a similar vein, in the lower reaches of Beccafumi’s first panel (Plate XXXI), visible in the center at eye-level, one abject figure is entirely upside down and eyeless, embedded in the ground so that we see only his upturned chin. In his second version, the artist softened such disconcerting motifs, depicting merely half figures, and upright, rather than inverted ones.73 The complete subjugation of Beccafumi’s first angels indelibly asserts the powerful control of the forces of good above them, and it is a control wrested back still more decisively in the final panel. In Michelangelo’s later Last Judgment, while we see in the context of this more familiar subject both foreshortened and descending bodies, especially among the demons and the damned, we do not see the same kind of radical displacement. Beccafumi’s upside-down angels suggest primal error and even something of the demonic even as – or perhaps because – their physiques are entirely human. Beccafumi’s fallen angels and Michelangelo’s demons lead us to reflect on the differences as well as correspondences that were understood to exist between these immaterial beings. For demons are not always or simply fallen angels, although this tends to be their definition in Scripture and in Rabbinical teachings.74 One difference is that demons, who have a longer, pre-Christian history, are capable not only of assuming any form they choose, including the monstrous, but also of inhabiting a host. Unseen, they might occupy the interior of bodies and manipulate natural forms. Angels, on the other hand, in their essential capacity as messengers, manifest themselves as visible or imaginable

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forms, as visions and signs that direct a subject or a beholder to a miracle or divine precept. Yet angels and demons do share common origins and common qualities. Renaissance humanists and theorists turned their attention to the larger genealogy of the spirits both as part of their project of discovery and reassessment of classical texts and in relation to their production of editions of the Church Fathers. In antiquity and into Early Christian times, the spirit world was populated by daemones who were intermediate agents between the heavens and humankind. Until about the fifth century C.E., however, the realm of the daemones embraced all spirits. This was the Neoplatonic world of Augustine who elaborated on it in his expansive City of God. Here, demons are lesser divine beings or dii minores.75 Augustine also relied on the Bible, which makes mention both of evil spirits – these arise in Judges and Kings – and of angels. His biblical angels also had their own long history. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the word angelos is a translation of the Hebrew mal’akh, or “messenger.” This is a universal referent for the angel. The Greek word daimon in the Septuagint indicated a less than divine natural spirit, and it served as a translation of more than one Hebrew word for complex entities such as divinities, beasts, and even idols.76 In the original Greek of the New Testament, the use of the word daimon led this term to be assimilated to the Judeo-Christian notion of an evil spirit or demon. Accordingly, in theory, demons command more roles than angels and greater potential for metamorphosis and materiality. This is so even taking into consideration the angel’s long-standing ability to appear in any guise. Although demons belong to the Judeo-Christian world view, they also belong to other and older religious cultures. In addition to their roles as embodiments of sin and vice, they are always clear enemies of faith. Luther’s emphasis on the Devil in his Michaelmas sermon had perhaps as much to do with his unease about the wiliness of the servants of evil as with his thoughts on the angels themselves or his agenda during the meetings of the imperial diet. Demons may work the limbs of physical creatures by means of possession, and they may also take on shocking hybrid features that they share with the Devil himself, whether those of bats, dragons, lions, monkeys, locusts, reptiles, toads, or wolves.77 And, in general, by Luther’s time, the very invisibility of all spirits led writers to offer strangely counter-intuitive advice about ways

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to discern and represent them; this, however, was often advice founded on medieval tenets – a point that needs restating. Above all, for the Renaissance artist and scholar, demons may also act outside the religious sphere as inspiriting figures of genius.78 efh

The Dominican and theologian, Ambrogio Catarino, in his Disputatio (published in 1552), considered why painters might be urged to depict the unseen spirits, including angels. Among his reasons was that painted angels did not, in fact, resemble angels any more than the painted dove resembles the Holy Spirit. Citing Pseudo-Dionysius, he noted that the “more dissimilar the similitudes that convey God to us are, so much the less are they dangerous.”79 Catarino participated in the Council of Trent’s discussions on art. His views here seem directed toward two kinds of audiences for art: those who appreciate the impossibility of rendering the ineffable and those who may need an explication of what it is, in fact, that is being represented. He voiced opinions that were published in vernacular texts, as well, and these were likely read by artists. Taking up an Augustinian (and Aquinian) stance, he advocated that the educated should instruct the uneducated on the dilemma of dissimilarity, and on the slippage, then, between image and truth.80 In his Trattato (1563), Gilio would dwell on Paul’s famous passage on charity, commenting that: If I spoke with the tongues of men and angels, I wanted, with these words, to demonstrate the difference there is between one and the other. Although a man could not speak if he did not have a mouth, a tongue, teeth, a palate and a voice, the angel does not have any of these things and yet speaks.81

In like manner, Gregorio Comanini, in his work on the purpose of painting, Il Figino, thought still further about the problem of angels: When angels appeared to men, they took human forms, beautiful and young in appearance, as one reads in the holy pages of that angel that accompanied Tobias. [Tasso] has said that Gabriel composed himself of human members, and that he depicted [himself] with an age between adolescence and childhood. Certainly it is true that painting an angel with wings is a fantastical imitation, it not having been written

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anywhere that any angel, in its apparition, had winged shoulders. Yet one should not for this reason say that a poet or painter, forming a simulacrum of an angel and making him feathered, has imitated dissimilarly and thus committed an error: for however false it is that any angel ever let itself be seen by men with wings on its back, the signification of those wings is nevertheless true, it being true that angels are agile and quick in their execution of divine commandments.82

Comanini argues here for the representational meaning or truth of angels. He is caught, however, in a paradox: if angels and demons exist, as doctrine holds, then they are more – indeed, entirely other than – the creations that exist in our intellect and imagination, let alone in works of art.83 Comanini noted that while “metaphors and allegories” might be appropriate to “secular images,” the question remained as to the purpose of sacred ones. These must serve as “a book of the ignorant.” These writers also affirm, by implication, both sophistication and discrimination on the part of artists and their beholders, more, perhaps, than we have sometimes been willing to allow them. Like Isabella d’Este at her theatrical performance in 1503, these Cinquecento theorists and their readers were capable of understanding that an angel in a work of art was a sign for an angel. A painted or sculpted angel constituted a marvelous sign that brought with it both tradition and imaginative complexity; by implication, it could inspire admiration and even transport in much the same way as a poem, a song, or a mystery play. In sixteenth-century debates about the sacramental presence of the Eucharist and the character of the sign in relation to Christ’s body, reformers were similarly indebted, as we have seen, to medieval theological precepts, mindful to defend the inviolate mysteries of the faith. Later sixteenth-century writers on art, and artists themselves, audaciously elided the world of the spirits with the notion of the artist’s fantasia or idea. None other than Federico Zuccari would make so bold as to portray his brother and fellow artist, Taddeo, aided in his studies by two angels. Of the methods of design that Federico discussed in lectures at Rome’s Accademia di San Luca, disegno angelico was key.84 Such analogies became a kind of trope in the later Cinquecento and early Seicento.85 According to the biographer, Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696), Guido Reni would go so far as to confess that, although he could not enter heaven to see his angel, he had created his St. Michael from his own “idea.”86

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In light of these kinds of self-conscious and erudite analogies, which go hand in hand with changes in the professional status of artists and their growing academic profiles, the winged form is transformed into a multivalent referent for genius, thereby harking back to classical exemplars. Cinquecento artists and their critics debated the proper decorum of sacred and secular imagery, including the question of wings. When Gilio critiqued the “errors” of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, he focused most particularly on the angels, censuring the artist for their contortions and for their lack of wings. The protagonists in Gilio’s dialogue weigh the issue carefully, one noting that angels, in point of fact, do not have wings. Another speaker, the churchman, Coradini, noted that wings are vital symbols of the angel’s speed.87 Citing Ezekiel on the Cherubim, as well as Isaiah, Coradini points out that wings distinguish the angel from the human and that they signify his velocity. In the guise of beautiful young men, moreover, he asserts that angels cannot be mistaken for demons.88 In these ways, Comanini, the writer, is eloquent about the artist’s obligation. For him, as for his contemporaries, angels raised critical if not intractable questions as to the source of the images the artist devised: did they derive from nature or the mind? efh

In 1561, Pope Pius IV realized the dream of the Sicilian friar, Antonio del Duca (1491–1564). He dedicated the Roman church located amid the great ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. This church, Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, realized Fra Antonio’s long-held devotion to the seven Archangels, a devotion that had begun around 1513 when he was choirmaster in Palermo.89 There, in the church of Sant’Angelo, he had uncovered an icon of the “Seven Angelic Princes.” Guided by a sense of purpose and God’s providence, he traveled to Rome. There, he became chaplain to Cardinal Antonio Maria Ciocchi del Monte, for whom he wrote a liturgy for the Mass of Seven Angels. After Del Monte’s death, in 1533, Fra Antonio held a series of short-term posts until 1541. In that year, he returned to the Eternal City, and made a visit to the Baths of Diocletian. There, he beheld a radiant vision of seven martyrs. He proceeded to write the names of his Archangels, including the four Byzantine ones, on the ancient columns of the Baths’ caldarium.90 Still

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committed to his cause, Fra Antonio then made a pilgrimage to Loreto and to Venice, where he had his liturgy published and sponsored a copy of San Marco’s mosaic of the Virgin and Seven Angels. When Pius IV granted Fra Antonio his wish, in 1561, none other than Michelangelo would became the project’s architect in the last years of his life. Fra Antonio’s story reminds us that there are as many continuities in the cult of the angels as there are ruptures. Churchmen and artists continued to reprise scholastic classifications of the angels even as they made aspects of the angels’ theological definitions still more formal. The Jesuits, founded in mid-century by Ignatius Loyola, were important advocates for the angels. This would be most vividly expressed at their foundation, the Gesù, in Rome, a building project to which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese would contribute, and which houses its own Chapel of the Angels. This chapel would be joined by others. In Florence, in the 1580s, the Veronese artist, Jacopo Ligozzi, decorated a chapel dedicated to the angels with three works that also appeared at the Gesù: Jacob’s Ladder, the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and an altarpiece depicting the Seven Archangels.91 Artists continued to think about the ways in which representing angels engaged the naturalistic tenets of their craft and, equally, about how to depict the boundaries of physical vision and inward revelation to which angels belong. Meanwhile, the Church continued to sponsor the cult of the angels. In 1586, Sixtus V stated formally that each human soul is accompanied by an angel. In 1608, Pope Paul V officially established the cult of the guardian angels.92 In 1670, Clement X would designate the first Sunday in September as their feast.93 The guardian angel’s scriptural origins lie in Exodus and Psalms: “Behold I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place which I have prepared” (Exodus 23: 20); “For he will give his angels charge of you / to guard you in all your ways. / On their hands they will bear you up, / lest you dash your foot against a stone” (Psalms 91: 11). He is also a mainstay of medieval angelology going back to Augustine’s City of God, in which the angels, as light, lead the soul to God. In dwelling on these themes in his Summa (1, 113, 4), Aquinas reiterated the attributes of Pseudo-Dionysius’s orders, determining that only the lowest order of Angels comprise our guardians. The Augustinian Order had a special predilection for this doctrine, and one of its members, Luther himself,

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maintained that every child has his or her guardian angel. This marks the beginning of the popularity of the guardian angel in European visual culture, and also of the confusion of such images with those of Tobias and his angel; this conflation lasted well into modern times.94 For Catholics, as opposed to Protestants, the relationship between the angel and his ward is frequently sensuous and physical, for the angel touches or holds his child, or makes eye contact with him or her. Protestants inclined to represent the angel as invisible to his charge, watching over him unseen from the sidelines or as a projection of an inner vision.95 Erudite Catholic treatises on the angels, destined for seminarians and learned churchmen, proliferated from the late sixteenth into the seventeenth century. Pseudo-Dionysius gained new admirers, and writers and reformers alike would reaffirm the truth of his Nine Orders. Among these writers were the historian, Cesare Baronio, and the Jesuit, Robert Bellarmine.96 A significant group of seventeenth-century authors turned to the subject of angels, creating among them a flowering of treatises. These constitute a fascinating comparative study in their own right. Among them were Giovanni Maria Tarsia’s Trattato sulla natura degli angeli, nel quale tute le cose attinenti ad essa natura si contengono (Florence, 1576); Aloysius Gonzaga’s Meditazione sopra gli angeli santi e particolarmente sopra gli angeli custodi (1606); Andrea Vittorelli’s De Angelorum Custodia (1605) and his De i ministerii et operationi angeliche (1611); Francesco Albertini’s Trattato dell’angelo custode (1612); and Francesco Suarez’s De angelis (1620).97 These followed upon and were consistent with the Council of Trent’s Catechism that God “created from nothing spiritual nature, and angels innumerable to serve and minister to him: and these he replenished and adorned with admirable gifts of his grace and power.”98 The decoration of the Chapel of the Angels at the Gesù, and especially the choice and arrangement of its biblical episodes, displays many correspondences with themes taken up by these authors, particularly the Jesuit, Aloysius Gonzaga, and Francesco Albertini. These episodes include what are, by this time, canonical angelic subjects: the Fall of the Rebel Angels, Jacob’s Ladder, Tobias and the Angel, and the Healing of Tobit. They accompany another, less frequently shown subject, namely, that of the Angel Leading the Prodigal Son to his Father.99 None

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other than Federico Zuccari contributed to this program, and it is no coincidence that he had his own special affinity with angels. Born in Sant’Angelo in Vado, a town in the Marche named for St. Michael, Zuccari linked his artistic destiny and that of his brother with angels from the very beginning. In his drawing for the Vita illustrata for Taddeo Zuccari, two large angels shepherd the fourteen-year-old boy away from his parents.100 For Filippo Neri and Federico Borromeo, protector of the Academy of St. Luke which Federico had revived, angels were particularly dear. In Federico’s theoretical writings, he may also have been influenced by the treatise on angels written by the Florentine, Giovanni Maria Tarsia, in 1576. Between 1575 and 1579, Federico occupied himself with completing the revolving spheres of Vasari’s fresco of the cupola of the cathedral. Besides this program’s evident debt to Dante’s cosmos, Federico likely read Tarsia’s work and the author’s outline of a theory sympathetic to his own with respect to Disegno.101 Tarsia had taken an Augustinian approach to his task of defining the angels, and this cast of speculation in turn informed Zuccari’s Idea dei pittori, scultori ed architetti. In it, Zuccari reflected that: “God the Highest Artificer and Painter, created, devised, and ornamented this world . . . but he also created, painted, and ornamented another world, spiritually in the mind of the Angel.”102 For Zuccari, the ideas and actions of angels make manifest divine Disegno, for the angel mediates Disegno’s theory and practice in a way that is parallel with Disegno Umano in both its internal and external forms.103 In a preliminary drawing for his fresco of Disegno in the Palazzo Zuccari, Rome (c. 1598), he delineates three winged beings who acknowledge Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture with crowns, circling above the Father of Disegno himself. He reworked these figures in the fresco (Fig. 66).104 Nevertheless, the allusive interplay among allegories – for genius, virtue, the Idea, or Disegno’s companions – and angelic embodiments of divine light after Dante seems deliberate, as if to suggest that the angel profitably lends and shares his incorporeal talents and poetical associations to the task of the artist. These seem fitting reflections with which to close. Zuccari was writing as a successful professional man who was employed at one of Rome’s most elevated sacred monuments. He arrives, by way of an unproblematic line of theological reasoning, at a remarkable conclusion. Not only

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66. Federico Zuccari, Apotheosis of the Artist (fresco) (c. 1598), Palazzo Zuccari, Rome (Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

is God, as artist, the source for the earth’s manifold beauty, for he is also the creator of the angels. In their mind is another world also given to them by God. This world, Zuccari implies, may be compared to the idea in the mind of the artist, which, in the end, as invisible and perfected, transcends all others.

NOTES

Introduction 1.

2.

3.

4.

“Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,/Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,/Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,/And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone . . . ” Wallace Stevens, “Angels Surrounded by Paysans,” in “The Auroras of Autumn” (1950), in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America/Literary Classics of the United States/ Penguin Books, 1997), 423; see also “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination,” 637–751. More recently, see Marco Bussagli, Storia degli Angeli: Racconto di Immagini e di Idee (Milan: Rusconi, 1991); David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2001); the excellent anthology, Angelic Spirituality: Medieval Perspectives on the Ways of the Angels (The Classics of Western Spirituality), trans. and intro. by Steven Chase (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002); Kevin P. Sullivan, Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004); Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance, eds. Isabel Iribarren and Martin Lenz (Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy) (Surrey, UK/ Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Angeli: Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam, eds. Giorgio Agamben and Emanuele Coccia (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2009). An important exception is the collection of essays in Angels in the Early Modern World, eds. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In their own introduction (“Migrations of angels in the early modern world,” 2), the editors state that “early modern historians have to date paid relatively little attention to the cultural, intellectual and religious ramifications of beliefs about angels in the period between 1500 and 1800. This neglect is puzzling, as many other aspects of the supernatural, including prodigies, portents, miracles and providences, have recently come under the spotlight.” See now Walsham’s “Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in PostReformation England,” Past and Present 208 (August 2010): 78–130; Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and, from a more broad perspective, Valery Rees, From Gabriel to Lucifer: A Cultural History of Angels (London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013). See also the older, general study of Jeanne Villette, L’Ange dans l’art d’occident du XIIème au XVIème siècle: France, Italie, Flandre, Allemagne (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1940). By “metaphysical,” I mean Dante’s understanding of “the relation between the world and the ground of its being, that constitutes the philosophical-theological

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

foundation, and to a large degree the motivation of all Dante’s concerns . . .” See Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press/The American Academy of Religion, 2005), 3. See the important argument about classical origins of Gunnar Berefelt, A Study on the Winged Angel: The Origin of a Motif (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1968), and particularly the helpful analysis of Peers, 30–60. Marco Bussagli, “Gli angeli e i venti: considerazioni sul simbolismo aereo delle ali angeliche,” Arte Medievale (Series 2) 5/2 (1991): 107–126. The author notes (109–110) that Tertullian and others depended in this on Psalm 104 (103), which also, in turn, influenced the koranic suras. Bussagli, “Gli angeli,” 112–116. Bussagli, “Gli angeli,” 120. Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, NC/London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4–43; 41: “Spiritus translates the Greek pneuma, which also means wind, breath, a spiritual being (such as the Holy Ghost), or even an angel (such as the ministering angel-pneuma referred to by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 13–14). Accordingly, the enchanting angelic spirits playing upon musical instruments sculptured by Donatello and his shop for the high altar of the Basilica of the Santo in Padua (1447–50) – which are in fact named as angeli in the documents – are conceived, as their infantile state indicates, as airily diminutive spiritelli.” Peers, 30. On angels as eunuchs and cubicularii, see Cyril Mango, “St. Michael and Attis” (1984), cited in Peers, 187. This is ably argued by Peers, 32–33. See Peers’ discussion (30–31) of the scholarship; see esp. Martin Büchsel, “Die Schöpfungsmosaiken von San Marco: Die Ikonographie der Erschaffung des Menschen in der frühchristlichen Kunst,” Städel-Jahrbuch 13 (1991): 29–80. Peers, 35. Peers, 35–36. Tertullian, Apologeticum adversus gentes pro Christianis XXII, 8, in Peers, 35 n. 42. “In the following outline of On the Six Wings of the Cherubim, the human soul flies by means of the first two wings, which together form compunction or affective devotion, then by means of the two wings representing purification of body and mind, and finally by means of two wings representing love of neighbor and love of God.” Chase (32), who gives a helpful summary of this structure in his introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 32–34. See a reproduction in On the Six Wings of the Cherubim, Section One, in Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 126; further examples of the independent “Cherub” image (though it is, as she also notes, a Seraph) are analyzed by Mary J. Carruthers, “Ars oblivionalis, ars inveniendi: The Cherub Figure and the Arts of Memory,” Gesta 48/ 2 (2009): 99–117. On the Six Wings of the Cherubim, Section Two, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 145. Carruthers, 107–108; Fig. 3: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 30. 24, fol. 3v (Italian; c. 1410; probably Dominican). This Cherub stands on a wheel, after Ezekiel 10: 9, whose seven spokes are described as equivalent to the seven works of mercy; another text notes that “this Cherub is depicted in human likeness; it has six wings which represent the six ethical actions” by which a devout soul might be redeemed. See also her “Moving Images in the Mind’s Eye,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, eds. Jeffrey

Notes to pages 6–8

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 287–305. Carruthers, “Ars oblivionalis,” 108; the translations of the Latin terms are hers. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 48; 263 n. 103; 50–51. The two Cherubim who hover on the ark of the covenant represent the “incomprehensible trinitarian wisdom.” Richard recorded three different kinds of movement of birds in flight: linear, circular, and hovering. He linked these to the operation of ratio, expanding thereby the limits of the soul’s awareness of the Trinitarian God; thus, linear flight became cogitatio; circular flight became meditation or meditatio; and hovering flight constituted contemplatio, or contemplation. Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 343–344 n. 58; see also his Angelic Wisdom: The Cherubim and the Grace of Contemplation in Richard of St. Victor (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), esp. xx–xxiii on “hovering” as summing up the highest form of contemplation, but also throughout, on hovering as evoking important aspects of Richard’s contemplative method such as “stillness and motion” and, more profoundly, “the coincidence of opposites” that describes his apophatic and cataphatic theology. Paradiso, 10, 131–132, in Chase, Angelic Wisdom, vii. Raimundo Panikkar, “The Contemplative Look: An Old Vision of Reality,” Monastic Studies 19 (1991): 169, quoted in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 62; 266 n. 138. Peers, 37. Peers, 37–38. As a group of identical figures, the men may, too, have possessed a Trinitarian symbolism. As noted by Peers (41 n. 52), angels are mentioned in Colossians (1: 16) and Ephesians (1: 21). The Nine Orders appear in Scripture: Seraphim (Isaiah 6); Cherubim (Gen. 3: 24, Ex. 25: 22, Ex. 37: 7–9, I Kings 6: 23–28, Ez. 1: 4–28, Ez. 10–12, Ez. 41: 18–20); Thrones (Col. 1: 16); Virtues (Eph. 1: 21); Dominations, Principalities, and Powers (Eph. 1: 21, Col. 1: 16); Archangels (I Thess. 4: 16, Jude 9); Angels (Gen. 16: 7, as an example). This is given among the writings of John of Damascus, in Peers, 41. A seventh-century cameo from Constantinople (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC), with an inscription “Powers,” shows two winged men. Peers, 41–42; Fig. 8. The earliest images of them are in the fifth- to sixth-century apse mosaic of the church of Hosios David, Thessaloniki. The iconography of the two orders could also be confused. Peers, 46–49. Before Iconoclasm, artists used “a more naturalistic ‘classical’ style to indicate the distinct qualities of angels.” Peers, 49. “The issues were never resolved as the subjects, that is the angels, were not open to autopsy by artists, since knowledge of angels was derived primarily through descriptions of their enigmatic epiphanies in scripture. Because of the distance of these subjects, painters, mosaicists and sculptors were forced to sidestep problems of making apprehensible something only partially seen and known in the past.” Peers, 56. Cf. Peers, 58. Marshall and Walsham, 5. In 1215, the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council recorded that the angels were created out of nothing when time began. “For just as the brand is known through the fire, the one the underlying matter, the other the fire; so with the heavenly powers, they are in essence aerial spirit, if you would, or immaterial fire according to scripture, ‘Who maketh his angels

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Notes to pages 8–16

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

spirits; his ministers a flaming fire’ (Ps. 104: 4). Wherefore they are in a place, and become visible, they appear in an image of their own bodies, in this way, to the worthy. But the source of their holiness being outside of their nature is brought to fulfillment by contact with the Spirit.” Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto, in Peers, 18 n. 74. Jane Turner, ed., Encyclopedia of Renaissance and Mannerist Art (New York: Grove’s Dictionary, 2000), 680. “Aria was, finally, a way of making the invisible visible, and thus an aspect of one of the deepest motivations of Renaissance art, present in everything from allegory, which gave the intelligible sensuous form, to the study of movement, which made evident the movements of the soul.” David Summers, “‘ARIA II’: The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art,” Artibus et historiae 10/20 (1989): 23. See also Alessandro Nova, The Book of the Wind: The Representation of the Invisible (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). Vasari, in Summers, “‘ARIA II’,” 21–22. Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Francesco Mazzuoli,” in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. Gaston C. de Vere, vol. 5 (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1913), 246. See Summers’ description, 25. See also the sensitive essay by Paul Barolsky, “Leonardo’s Gentle Breeze,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 30/1 (Fall 2010): 12– 15, in which he analyzes Leonardo’s Annunciation (1470s) (Uffizi), and in light of Alessio Baldovinetti’s Annunciation (mid-1460s) (San Miniato al Monte, Florence). I am indebted to the author for sharing his meditations on the representation and meaning of aria and spiritus. David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); see the review by Andrew Butterfield, “The Breakthrough,” The New Republic (July 5, 1999): 41–45. The clouding eyes of the fish are among the details noted by Brown, who identified Tobias and the Angel (National Gallery of Art, London) as Leonardo’s first painting, even if it is not entirely executed by him; see Chapter 4 on Tobias and the angel. See the provocative essay by Claude Panaccio, “Angel’s Talk, Mental Language, and the Transparency of the Mind,” in Costantino Marmo, ed., Vestigia, Imagines, Verba: Semiotics and Logic in Medieval Theological Texts (XIIth–XIVth Century) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1997), 323–335. Panaccio, 324–325. Panaccio, 325. Panaccio, 326. Panaccio, 328–329. These are Panaccio’s terms (331) and his conclusions.

1 Pure Act: Medieval Angelology and Dante’s Angels 1.

2.

Frederick Van Fleteren, “Angels,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 20; see Chapter 5. Van Fleteren, 20, whom I am following closely. For spirits and intellectual beings, see En. Ps. 103, 1, 15; 130, 9. The author notes that Augustine derived this notion of the relation among demons, humans, and the gods from Apuleius and Porphyry (Gn. Litt. 3, 9; City of God 9, 6). See also Goulven Madec, “Angelus,” in Augustinus-Lexikon, vol. 1 (1986): 303–315.

Notes to page 17

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

Matter of faith: En. Ps. 103, 1, 15; messengers: Jo. Ev. Tr. 24, 7; S. 7; Trin. 2, 13: Van Fleteren, 20–21. Gn. litt. 1, 3, 7; City of God 11, 9: Van Fleteren, 20–21. Cf. Daniel 3: 57; Psalms 148, for references to the creation of angels. Ibid. City of God 11, 32; 12, 6, cited in Van Fleteren, 21, who observes that “angel” comes to symbolize all beings in the heavenly city created on the first day (Gn. litt. 5, 19). “It is clear that this heaven’s heaven which you made in the beginning is some kind of intellectual creation [angels]. Participating in your eternity, though in no sense coeternal with you, O Trinity, this intellectual creation largely transcends its mutability through the intense bliss it enjoys in contemplation of you, and by holding fast to you with a constancy from which it has never fallen since its first creation, it is independent of the spinning changes of time.” Confessions 12, 9 (in Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo [Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 186–187). Paul: Col. 1: 16; Rom. 8: 38; 1 Thess. 4: 16; choirs and legions: Jo. Ev. Tr. 1, 5: Van Fleteren, 21. At the front of the monument, an angel collects souls in a napkin, another bears models of the two cities, a third holds an open book, and a fourth holds a chained devil. At the back, one holds a scepter and globe while another appears to bear a lance; a third carries a soul, while a fourth supports the mandorla of a seated figure of Christ. Since the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius was credited with ten letters and four treatises, including The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and Mystical Theology, written in Greek, possibly in Palestine. He is not the same figure as the first-century Athenian known as St. Dionysius the Areopagite, who was converted by Paul [Acts 17: 34] and traditionally identified as a martyr and first bishop of Athens. See Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid et al. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), esp. Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Odyssey of Dionysian Spirituality,” 11–24; Jean Leclerq, “Influence and Noninfluence of Dionysius in the Western Middle Ages,” 25–32; 34; 36. An excellent summary of Pseudo-Dionysius’s philosophy in relation to medieval theology is given by Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Les Anges et la philosophie: subjectivité et fonction cosmologique des substances séparées à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002), esp. 15–24; see also Rosemary A. Arthur, PseudoDionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies Series) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Arthur makes the persuasive argument that the author focused on the angelic hierarchy as a unifying topic for the Church of his day. The angelic hierarchy offered a mirror for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which, Dionysius intended to demonstrate, was thus part of the structure of God’s universe. He deliberately avoided other subjects, such as the Incarnation, Cross, and Atonement. See the useful diagram of Dionysius’s heavenly and earthly hierarchies in William K. Riordan, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 50. See the helpful account of Peers, 4–6; Philippe Faure, “Denys le PseudoAréopagite et le Moyen Age Occidental: Réception et Influence de la Hiérarchie Céleste,” Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuixà 26 (1997): 213–216; Yves Christe and Romaine Bonvin, “Les neufs choeurs angéliques; une création tardive de l’iconographie chrétienne,” Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuixà 15 (1984): 67–99.

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Notes to pages 18–19

10. Peers, 5. Bonaventure frequently evoked Isaiah 6: 1–3 as an example of proper worship since, when the Seraphim cry out “Holy, holy, holy,” they enacted a perfect expression of unmediated prayer. Later in his life, as the Franciscan Order faced its own inner divisions and outward perils, the Seraphim became for him the paradigm of ecstatic union with God. Keck, 127–128; esp. Chapter 7, “Franciscan Angelology and the Crises of the Franciscan Order,” 129–154. 11. Mystical Theology, in Peers, 5–6. See the excellent explication (and translations) of Dionysius’s philosophy by Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). 12. Peers (6), quoting Averil Cameron, “The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation,” in The Church and the Arts (Studies in Church History), vol. 25, ed. D. Wood (London, 1992), 28. 13. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 151; Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 108. 14. Faure, 213; see the important collection, Jean Scot Érigène et l’histoire de la philosophie, Laon, 7–12 juillet, 1975 (Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, No. 561) (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977), esp. Maurice de Gandillac, “Anges et hommes dans le Commentaire de Jean Scot sur la ‘Hiérarchie Céleste,” 393–403; Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), esp. “c) Angelology,” 167–175; Appendix 2, “Eriugena’s Mathematical Angelology,” 308–312. 15. Faure, 215; “St. Gregory the Great refers to Dionysius in his own commentary on the angels and probably had the complete works at Rome. But the study of Dionysius did not take off in the Latin West until the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer sent a copy of the Dionysian corpus as a gift to the Frankish king Louis the Pious in 827. This copy served as the source of the first translations of Dionysius into Latin. The first translation, made around 838 by Hilduin, abbot of a monastery near Paris (who identified Dionysius not only as St. Dionysius the Areopagite but also as the first bishop of Paris), was so unintelligible that Charles II asked the great Irish philosopher, John Scottus Eriugena, to make a new translation that he completed in 862 and that was subsequently revised with clarifications in 875. The influence of Dionysius is profound in Eriugena’s own thought as it would be later in the Franciscan tradition (especially Grosseteste and Bonaventure) and also to a lesser extent in the Dominican (both Albert and Aquinas wrote commentaries). In fact, the abiding-procession-return triad may be said to form the essential structure of Aquinas’ unfinished masterpiece, the Summa Theologica.” Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysiusareopagite/). 16. Faure, 214. 17. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 17; Josef Koch, “Über die Lichtsymbolik im Bereich der Philosophie und der Mystik des Mittelalters,” Studium Generale 13 (1960): 653–670. 18. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 35; see also the helpful study of Riordan. 19. Homily 34, Section 7, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 35–36. 20. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 36. 21. “Likewise, the angels are ‘incarnated’ in their various forms of beauty, thereby ‘toning down’ the blast of the divine, immaterial light. God as light is thus beheld

Notes to pages 19–21

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

in the protective accommodation of the beauty of the angel.” Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 36. Chase notes, too (260 n. 72), that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Ananias, Misael, and Azarias) were, in like manner, shielded from the furnace by the angel (Dan. 3). See Chapter 2. On further definitions of cataphatic as opposed to apophatic method, see Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 41– 44; Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Deirdre Carabine, “Eriugena’s Use of the Symbolism of Light, Cloud, and Darkness in the Periphyseon,” in Eriugena: East and West, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 141–152. See Chapter 2. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 42; 36. Celestial Hierarchy 1.3, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 36–37; “As a mode of contemplative ascent, cataphatic theology contends that the triune God can be found in all created things as shadows, echoes, pictures, vestiges, representations, or footprints. It cannot be overemphasized that the apophatic way is inextricably linked to the cataphatic way.” The two Cherubim represent both ways, as they do specifically in Richard of Saint-Victor’s Mystical Ark. Chase, 41–42; 261 n. 88; Chase, Angelic Wisdom. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 44–45. Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, Chapter 2, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 38. This is a point well-made by Keck, 49. Keck, 50. Keck explicates a further refinement of the literal sense of Scripture (in addition to the anagogical) as being important for thirteenth-century angelology, constituting a fifth method of reading. In Aquinas’s formulation, it is a “parabolic sense,” which, in Keck’s words (51–52): “was crucial for medieval readings of angels because various biblical passages use certain images to refer to angels that do not quite fit the traditional conception of what the spirits of heaven are. Hebrews 1: 7 (drawing on Psalms 104: 4), for example, identifies angels with winds and with fire. Pseudo-Dionysius uses the parabolic sense (though he does not use the phrase) to clarify this passage; ‘winds,’ for example, can symbolize a number of things – the speed of angelic operations, the ceaseless activity of God, or even how the higher beings live pleasingly before God. Only the last of these could belong properly to one of the traditional fourfold categories. The Areopagite frequently employs this parabolic sense to explain the ‘anthropomorphisms’ of angels in Scripture. Such anthropomorphisms constituted one of the greatest problems for medieval exegetes regarding angels.” Keck, 49. On these three authorities, including Caesarius (1180–1240), see Keck, 155–207. Periphyseon, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 39. Alan of Lille, Treatise on the Angelic Hierarchy, “The Angelic Order,” in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 39. As Chase observes (261 n. 82), Alan of Lille defines theophany as “angelic knowledge” (scientia angelica), contrasting it with theosophy, or the “wisdom of God,” and with theology as “human knowledge.” Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 40. Chase, Angelic Spirituality (on Eriugena), 164; see my chapter, “Augustine’s Light,” in Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 125–147. Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, in Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 189; for the notion of visual exegesis, see Patrice Sicard, Diagrammes médiévaux et exégèse

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

visuelle: Le Libellus de formatione arche de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris: Brepols, 1993), cited in Chase, 312 n. 3. This is well put by Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 189. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 46; 262 n. 100; Chase, Angelic Wisdom, 48–60. See Keck (71–114) for a concise outline of the thirteenth-century theological curriculum relative to angels. Prologue, quoted by Ewert H. Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxi–xxii. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 69–70. For Dante, the Seraphim are “most in God,” and St. Francis, “all seraphic in love,” can be contrasted with St. Dominic who “in wisdom, was a splendor of Cherubic light” (Paradiso 4, 28; 11, 37; 39), in Alison Cornish, “Angels,” The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1836) (New York/London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 43. Bonaventure, Prologue, in Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxii. This image, too, relates to the contemplative tradition in which Christ is likened to an angel; also the tradition, following the vision in Isaiah 6, that the Seraph is “an exemplar of the total person of Christ.” Hugh of Saint-Victor, On the Six Wings of the Cherubim, Section One, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 68–69. This is a point made by Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxii. Bonaventure, Prologue, in Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxii. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Consideration, V, in Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxii. Cousins, Preface, Angelic Spirituality, xxiii. “We also understand by the two angels [the two cherubim on the ark of the covenant] the two Testaments, first the one and then the one that follows. These angels, by their placing, have been united with the body of the Lord himself, since both testaments equally announce the message of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Lord.” Homilies on the Gospel, Homily 25, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 8; see Exodus 25, 37; 1 Kings 6; 2 Chronicles 3, 5; Psalms 80: 1; 99: 1; Ezekiel 10: 5. Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos 103, 1, 15; repeated by Alan of Lille, Treatise on the Angelic Hierarchy, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 216. Here, he is talking about the archangels, and the word angelus. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and Celestial Hierarchy, in Riordan, 159–161. Jesus is the mediator between the Father and the angels, and between the Father and humankind, as the Word Incarnate. He is at the head of both hierarchies. Homily 34, Sections 8, 12, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 16. These are the two examples used by Chase, 18. For a broader study of this aspect of medieval society, see Giles Constable, “The Orders of Society,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Ronald W. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” in Mosaics of Friendship: Studies in Art and History for Eve Borsook, ed. Ornella Francisci Osti (Florence: Centro Di, 1999), 82. Keck, 117; 85; Bernard, “Twelfth Sermon on Psalm 90, ‘Qui Habitat’,” 121. This story is told by Caesarius of Heisterbach. See Keck, 178; 174–179. Keck, 117. Keck, 121. Keck, 121–122.

Notes to pages 25–27

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74.

Keck, 117–118. Keck, 119. Keck, 119. Caesarius of Heisterbach linked angels and virgins in quoting Matthew 22: 30, while Gregory the Great described one Equitius whose vision of himself being made a eunuch included an angel presiding. Afterward, he was fully able to fulfill his mission as spiritual leader. Two angels revealed to Aquinas the outcome of his own prayers for chastity. Keck, 119–120. On Caesarius, see also 156–179. Keck, 52–58; see also 42–44; 115–159. Keck, 122–123; see 123–154 for a detailed discussion of the special attention of the Franciscan Order to angelology. Bonaventure observed Francis’s devotion to the angels and to St. Michael. The saint founded a church dedicated to St. Mary of the Angels in which he encountered angels, and in which he died. Bonaventure himself, among other Franciscans, claimed to have spoken with an angel. Keck, 123–126; 140–145; 52. Keck, 152–154. Keck, 122, referring to The Augsburg Confession, Article 27, “Monastic Vows.” Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 48–49; 58. The phrase “no creature intervenes,” as the author notes (266 n. 128), comes from Augustine (De vera religione 55, 113; in Chase, 296 n. 11) and Eriugena also uses it. See Chase’s introduction to his Extract on the Celestial Hierarchy, in Angelic Spirituality, 217–218. See esp. Gallus’s Prologue to the Third Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 241–250. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 56. The author does not mention works of art, but the point remains. See Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (The Middle Ages Series) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). These themes engage fundamental points of departure between Eastern and Western traditions. See Chapter 2 on St. Michael. Alan of Lille, in his Treatise on the Angelic Hierarchy, specifically addresses the Seraphim and Cherubim and concepts of mediation. He also constructs a system of ways of seeing according to the bodily or to the interior eye. In many ways, his system, which has much in common with other medieval expositions of sight, echoes Augustine’s metaphysics of sight and illumination: “For instance, when a visible ray is detected for comprehension by the bodily eye, a beam of the ray strikes against an object and its parts are diffused around the obstacle. The object is returned to the eye as a kind of reflection and an image of the object is retained. In this way the soul is stimulated, as it were, to comprehension of objects by the senses. . . . The vision of reason, on the other hand, presents another form of comprehension by which we contemplate God. When we are directed toward comprehending God through reason, we gaze attentively upon the primary nature of creatures.” Treatise on the Angelic Hierarchy, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 206. Angels, on the other hand, contemplate God in an unmediated fashion. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 256 n. 26. This is the helpful summary of Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 323–324. Extract, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 221; 222.

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75. See the introduction of Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 235. 76. Angelic Spirituality, 235. Chase continues: “The mouth of the soul that speaks, the lips of the Bride that kiss, are joined as one to the Bridegroom, to Christ. They separate and, in longing, join again, even as the Bride repeats, ‘Oh, that he might kiss me’ ” [Song of Songs 1: 2]. As Gallus himself expresses it: “Such a mind [the silenced mind united with Dionysius’ One] asks for a kiss, that is, a conjunction or union beyond mind, though one still capable of separation. Dionysius has also written of these things. . . . ‘Prologue to the Third Commentary on the Song of Songs’ ”, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 248. 77. “That is, he uses the orders of angels as a means of describing the nature and goals of the human person and as a diverse but comprehensive path into God. For Gallus, the soul is, in effect, ontologically structured by the angelic orders.” Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 235–236. 78. Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 238. 79. First Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 239. 80. These are Chase’s terms: Angelic Spirituality, 327 n. 46. 81. John E. Joseph, “The Tongues of Men and of Angels: Knowledge, Inner Speech and Diglossia in Medieval Linguistic Thought,” in Flores Grammaticae: Essays in Memory of Vivien Law, eds. Nicola McLelland and Andrew R. Linn (Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2005), 119–139; esp. 123–133. 82. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 2, in Joseph, 127. 83. Joseph, 127. 84. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 2, in Joseph, 127–128. 85. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 2, in Joseph, 128. 86. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 2, in Joseph, 128. 87. Fontes vitae S. Thomae, “La vita di P. Calo,” 23–24, in Gail L. Geiger, Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Chapel: Renaissance Art in Rome (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 5) (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1986), 79; see also 73–88 on the sources, identification, and iconography of this miracle in the Carafa Chapel, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome. Daddi’s is another rare example of this episode. In Filippino Lippi’s version, the two angels bear lilies rather than the girdle, but they lift his cape to expose his sash. 88. Joseph, 129; Barbara Faes de Mottoni, “Enuntiatores divini silentii: Tommaso d’Aquino e il linguaggio degli angeli,” Medioevo: Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 12 (1986): 197–228; esp. Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Connaissance et langage des anges selon Thomas d’Aquin et Gilles de Rome (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002), 17–75; 179–207. 89. Thomas Aquinas, in Joseph, 129. 90. “To understand how one angel speaks to another, it must be considered that, as we explained above (1, 82, 4) when dealing with the actions and powers of the soul, the will moves the intellect to its operation. [. . .] When however the mind turns itself to the actual consideration of what it holds through habit, then one is speaking to oneself; for this mental concept is called the ‘inner verbum’. By the fact that the angel’s mental concept is ordered to be made known to another by the will of the angel himself, one angel’s mental concept is made known to another; and in this way does one angel speak to another. For to speak something to another means nothing other than to make one’s mental concept known to another.” Summa theologiae 1, 107, 1, in Joseph, 129–130. 91. Summa theologiae 1, 107, 4, in Joseph, 130. 92. Summa theologiae 1, 107, 2, in Joseph, 131.

Notes to pages 31–34

93. “[F]or angel to speak to angel is nothing else than to order his concept in such a way that it becomes known to the other, through his own will. Now what is conceived by the mind can be reduced to a twofold principle: viz., to God Himself, Who is the first truth; and to the will of the person who understands, through which we actually consider anything.” Summa theologiae 1, 107, 2, in Joseph, 131. 94. Summa theologiae 1, 107, 2, in Joseph, 131. 95. Joseph, 131. 96. “It is evident that a triple meaning can be understood by ‘tongues of angels’ here: one meaning is the language by which one human being speaks to another human being, and thus by ‘angels’ are to be understood men who are of higher knowledge, and by ‘men’ those who are of lower knowledge: and thus it says: if I speak in the tongues of men, i.e. of inferior knowledge, and angels, i.e. men of superior knowledge [. . .].” Reginald of Piperno, in Joseph, 132; see Joseph, 131–132. As Joseph notes, the second way poses “intractable problems” given that an angel’s thoughts are not visible to us and that they themselves are without bodies. Faes de Mottoni, 217–220. 97. Joseph, 132–133. 98. This a tantalizing point made well by Joseph, 133. 99. Joseph, 133–134. See Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1306), although it was not published until 1529. 100. “Cum igitur angeli ad pandendas gloriosas eorum conceptiones habeant promptissimam atque ineffabilem sufficientiam intellectus, qua vel alter alteri totaliter innotescit per se, vel saltim per illud fulgentissimum speculum, in quo cuncti representantur pulcerrimi atque avidissimi speculantur, nullo signo locutionis indiguisse videntur.” De vulgari eloquentia 1, 2, 2–3, in Cornish, 39; Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Lingua degli Angeli,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 1, ed. Umberto Bosco (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–), 271–272. 101. “On the Holy Angels,” Sermon Four, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 151. 102. See the introduction to her Sermons on the Holy Angels by Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 147–149. 103. Chase, 148. 104. Umiltà, in Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Consolation of the Blessed (New York: Alta Gaia Society, 1979), 142. 105. Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 149; “On the Holy Angels,” 150–151. 106. “On the Holy Angels,” 151. 107. “On the Holy Angels,” 151. 108. “On the Holy Angels,” 151. Umiltà here references Exodus (14: 29) and Matthew (25: 33). 109. This is a point made by Chase, 292 n. 11. 110. “On the Holy Angels,” 152–153. Umiltà speaks of Cherubim but, as Chase points out (293 n. 17), her references to the highest order and fire, among other things, indicate that he belongs among the Seraphim. Chase assigns the feminine to Sapiel according to the feminine noun, Sophia (and he also uses the feminine pronoun for Emmanuel). The name Sapiel is taken from Isaiah (7: 15; 8: 8) and Matthew (1: 23), and since it is not in the writings of the Evangelist, as she would have read them, Umiltà means that the saint himself spoke to her. Chase, 293 n. 19. 111. “On the Holy Angels,” 152.

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112. Sermon Eleven, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 154. In a way that portrays the senses, she continues her entreaty, which seems to be to Sapiel: “Place two seals of love upon my eyes with your holy fingers to correct their vision, so that they will not look with longing upon the things of this world. Keep my eyes continually open and aroused to vigilance. . . . Hold my ears with your holy hands in such a way that they may be firm in the name of Jesus so that no evil word bearing poison to my soul can ever enter them. Again, open, prepare, and excite my eyes to the praise of God, his mother, my angels in their particular heavens, and all of the divine court. Bind my feet in such a chain of love. . . . Hold my hands fast between your blessed wings. . . . Do not permit the wings of evil angels to draw near. They always cause the soul to dwell in wretchedness. Withdraw every deceitful odor so that my nose allows only the fragrance of the most precious flowers from paradise to enter my soul. . . . Hold fast to your good guardianship so that my bodily senses become the strong foundation of my spiritual senses, making it possible for my soul to rest in delight with her Beloved.” 113. Sermon Two, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 153. 114. Bonaventure, Sentences, 2, in Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969), 105–106. 115. See Hopper, 107–109. Chase (47–48; 262 n. 102) makes the important distinction between the Latin West and the East: “Angelic wisdom and formation understand that the ‘impossible possibility’ of visibility in invisibility, for instance, is grounded in the mystery of God. As it is precisely in God’s unific simplicity that the Trinitarian diversity of Persons springs and has its root, so it is likewise precisely in the visible through which the invisible is first encountered.” As he notes (n. 102): “In the East, the primary direction of movement is God’s trinitarian diversity grounding God’s unific simplicity.” 116. The Testaments are composed of three parts: law, prophets, and hagiographers in the Old Testament, and Evangelists, Apostles, and Fathers in the New Testament. God, angels, and humankind form three hierarchies. Hopper, 109. 117. Hopper, 109. 118. See Marcia L. Colish, “Early Scholastic Angelology,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 67 (1995): 80–109. 119. The anonymous author of the Summa sententiarum upheld these conclusions. Colish, 84. 120. Colish, 85–86. 121. Colish, 97–98. 122. Colish, 88–89. 123. Colish, 90–91. On guardian angels among medieval writers, in general, see Keck, 161–165. Derived from Matthew 18: 10, Acts 12: 15, and Tobit 3: 25, guardian angels were assumed by patristic writers and by medieval commentators, including Bonaventure, Caesarius, and Voragine. It was not until the thirteenth century, however, that the Church added a prayer to the guardian angels to the liturgy, and the Feast of the Guardian Angels was instituted only in 1608. 124. Colish, 99–101. 125. Colish, 103. 126. Colish, 103–105.

Notes to pages 37–41

127. Colish, 106. 128. Colish, 106–107. 129. Moevs, 28. 130. Moevs, 16–35. 131. Paradiso, 30, 38–42, in The Divine Comedy, ed. Mark Musa, vol. 3 (Penguin Books, 1986), 353. The spheres comprise Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Fixed Stars. 132. Moevs, 109. See the excellent entry by Cornish, 37–45 (and bibliography). 133. Moevs, 109–110. As the author implies, it would be simplistic, then, to label Aquinas as either Aristotelian or Neoplatonic, even as his thought was deeply indebted to concepts attributed to both: “Recent trends in the study of Aquinas have emphasized more and more the ‘Neoplatonic’ character of his thought, stressing for example the principle of participation as the key to Aquinas’s understanding of the relation of creatures (and humans in particular) to divine Being; since each distinction of finite form (essence) reflects a diverse participation in Being, and hence degree of perfection, Aquinas’s cosmos is a great and continuous Neoplatonic hierarchy, in which all things freely emanate from, and are permeated by, God, and God ‘governs the lower things by means of the higher.’ ” Ibid., 110; see also 31; 108. 134. Van Steenberghen (Histoire de la philosophie), in Moevs, 108. See An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. James F. Anderson, with a new intro. by W. Norris Clarke, S. J. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1953/1997); Cornish, 39–41. 135. Ralph McInerny, in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (Penguin Books, 1998), xxxiv. 136. Cornish, 44. 137. Cornish, 37, quoting Vita Nuova, 26, 2; 34, 1; 3. 138. Cornish, 39–40. 139. Cornish, 40–41. 140. Cornish, 41. 141. Cornish, 37. 142. Cornish, 37, citing the Convivio 1, 1, 7; Paradiso 2, 11. 143. Cornish, 38. 144. Cornish, 38. 145. Cornish, 38–39. 146. Convivio 3, 14, 2–4; Purgatorio 15, 16–24; Paradiso 10, 53; 29, 143–145, in Cornish, 39. 147. Paradiso 7, 133–141; 67–72, in Cornish (41), who notes how close Dante is here to Avicenna’s distinction between forms made directly by God, which are therefore invariable and stable, and those created by means of intermediaries. 148. Cornish, 42. 149. Convivio 2, 5, 13; Paradiso 28, in Cornish, 42. 150. Cornish, 42. 151. Purgatorio 4, 129; 9, 104; 21, 23; 12, 79; 15, 22; 16, 144; 19, 46; 22, 1–2; 27, 6, cited in Cornish, 44. 152. Purgatorio 2, 38; Inferno 23, 96; 34, 47, cited in Cornish, 44. 153. Purgatorio 32, 72; Paradiso 31, 133–135, in Cornish, 43; “Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti/ridere una bellezza, che letizia/era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi” (Paradiso 31, 133–135), cited in Peter S. Hawkins, “All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante’s Commedia,” in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, eds.

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Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 51. 154. On Consideration 5, 5, in Cornish, 43. 155. Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, MS 1080. See Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the ‘Divine Comedy’ (Bollingen Series, 81), 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), vol. 1, 280– 281; Dorothy Gillerman, “Dante’s Early Readers: The Evidence of Illustrated Manuscripts,” in The ‘Divine Comedy’ and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences (Acta of the International Dante Symposium, 1983), eds. Giuseppe di Scipio and Aldo Scaglione (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1988), 65–80. 156. In prescholastic cosmologies, there was an extra heaven known as the coelum Trinitatis, which “became a metaphor for the all-encompassing Trinity; precisely for this reason it was often interchanged with the Empyrean. Indeed, if the coelum Trinitatis was distinguished from the Empyrean in scholastic thought, it was only because the Empyrean was conceived as created and material, and hence among the created things contained within the all-containing deity. It seems evident that Dante has fused Empyrean and coelum Trinitatis in his uncreated and transcendental tenth heaven, which he identifies with the radiance of la mente divina. Indeed, the blessed, and the pilgrim himself, contemplate Christ and the Trinity from their ‘places’ within the Empyrean, and it is within the Empyrean that the mystery of the Trinity is revealed to Dante.” See also Paradiso, 23, 71–108; 31, 25–29; 33, 106–141; 30, 49–54; 31, 1–12. Moevs, 27; 199 n. 34. Dante usually avoids the word “empireo,” deploying instead an “array of metaphors for the omnipresent light-sweetness-love in which Being consists.” Moevs, 23; Robin Kirkpatrick, “Afterlives Now: A Study of Paradiso Canto 28,” in Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, eds. Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter (London and New York: Routledge, 2007): 166–184. 157. Moevs, 45. See 121–122 on Paradiso 13, where Aquinas speaks: “. . . as in Paradiso 29, Dante refers to the angels (the links in the ontological hierarchy) as ‘act’ or ‘actuality’ (giù d’atto in atto), and to sublunar material substance as ‘potentialities’ or ‘contingincies’ (potenze, contingenze)”; also 150–151: “That Beatrice calls the angels ‘pure act’ (puro atto [33]) has generated some confusion. In Christian thought, strictly speaking, only God is pure actuality. Insofar as angelic intelligences have identities and are thus distinguished one from another, they are not the act of existence (or perfect reflexive act of intellection or understanding) itself, and they therefore have a degree of potentiality (dependence or contingency); only in God is understanding, or the ‘power of sight’ (intelligere), identical with the act of existence itself (esse). Dante does refer to angels as both ‘pure form’ and ‘pure act’ (22, 32–33), and he observes in the Monarchia (1.3.7) that ‘their being is nothing other than their act of understanding’ (earum esse nichil est aliud quam intelligere), statements some have claimed show Averroistic influence (identifying the angels with God as first causes). This interpretation is unnecessary and unlikely: in medieval philosophy, ‘act’ is often used interchangeably with ‘form,’ a ‘pure form’ is simply an immaterial substance, and therefore what Beatrice means by puro atto is simply angels.” 158. Moevs, 45–46; see Purgatorio 18, 49–50. “Considered in its own essence (‘denuded of matter’), the human soul is an incorruptible intelligence, like an angel (Cv 3.2.14); unlike animal souls (Cv 3.7.5), it does not require any matter or substratum to exist, but body is its natural manifestation or completion (e.g. pg 25.88–108; Pd 14.43–66). The human soul is thus the ‘horizon’

Notes to pages 43–44

between the material and the immaterial, the corruptible and the incorruptible (Mn 3.15.3).” Moevs, 46. 159. Celestial Hierarchy, in Riordan, 160. 160. For Dante, against received wisdom, angels had no memory (Paradiso 29, 80–81). See the summary, “Angelic Orders,” at the University of Texas at Austin site. 161. Gill, 186; De Genesi ad litteram 4, 32 and 5, 5; 4, 33 (P.L. 34); see also Bernard Lohse, “Zu Augustins Engellehre,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 70 (1959): 279–291. 162. Gill, 186; 250 n. 182. 163. “Thus the angels, illuminated by that light by which they were created, themselves became light, and are called ‘day’, by participation in the changeless light and day, which is the Word of God, through whom they themselves and all other things were made. This is ‘the true light, which illuminates every man as he comes into this world’; and this light illuminates every pure angel, so that he is not light in himself, but in God. If an angel turns away from God he becomes impure: and such are all those who are called ‘impure spirits’. They are no longer ‘light in the Lord’; they have become in themselves darkness, deprived of participation in the eternal light. For evil is not a positive substance: the loss of good has been given the name of ‘evil’.” City of God 11, 9 (trans. Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, 1984, 440); see also 11, 19; 11, 33: “The two different companies of angels, appropriately called ‘Light’ and ‘Darkness’ ” (ibid., 468–469). 164. “And since the visual act always precedes The act of loving, bliss of love in each burns differently: some glow while others blaze. And now you see the height, you see the breadth Of Eternal Goodness that divides Itself Into countless mirrors that reflect Itself, remaining One, as It always was.” Canto 29. 165. See Chapter 5, and my essay, “Seeing, Falling, Feeling: The Sense of Angels,” for the collected papers of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. See, for example, the glow of light in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) (oil on oak) (117 × 162 cm) (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) (Fig. 61). 166. Convivio 2, 5, 12; Paradiso 29, 50, cited in Cornish, 44. 167. Cornish, 44. 168. Among Augustine’s angels are the angel who inhabited Balaam’s ass (Num. 22); Gabriel, who appeared to Mary (Luke 1: 19, 26); Lucifer (Isaiah 14: 12); Michael (Jude 9); the angel who appeared to Joseph (Matthew 2: 13); the angels at Christ’s tomb (John 20: 12); and the seven angels in the book of the Apocalypse (Revelation 8: 2) who are representatives of the seven churches (De doctrina Christiana 3, 30). Human beings in their state after the final resurrection are often described as equal to angels (Luke 20: 36). Christ (De Trinitate 3,10), the prophets (Io. Ev. Tr. 24, 7), John the Baptist (City of God 15, 23), and Paul (Gal. 3: 14; S. 37, 19) are also known as angels in their offices as divine messengers. Angels will divide the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, but only at the end of time (Epistulae 76, 2). Van Fleteren, 21. On the angels in the Bible, see also the useful summary in Marshall and Walsham, 3–4. 169. Van Fleteren, 21.

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170. Spiritual bodies: De Genesi ad litteram 6, 19; 6, 24; Enarrationes in Psalmos 145, 3; Epistulae 102, 20; invisible to humans: Conlatio cum Maximino Arianorum episcopo. Van Fleteren, 22. 171. Enarrationes in Psalmos 77, 5. Van Fleteren, 22. 172. Sermones 6. Van Fleteren, 22. 173. John Freccero, “Dante and the Neutral Angels,” Romanic Review 51 (1960): 5 (whose translation this is); see also his “The Neutral Angels,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 110–118; Hawkins, “All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante’s Commedia,” 36–59. 174. Freccero, “Dante and the Neutral Angels,” 11–12 n. 21. 175. See Musa’s reproduction of Sayers, 382 (and his summaries, which I am following closely here). 176. See Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion; also Douglas Biow’s review of my book in Italian Culture 24/1 (2006–2007): 196; Paradiso, 10, 120; 32, 34–36. This is the only mention of Augustine until St. Bernard indicates his presence in the celestial rose. Dante does cite Augustine’s works frequently in Convivio, De monarchia, and Epistles. See Musa’s notes to Paradiso, vol. 3 (Penguin Classics, 1986), 383. “And next, inside this tiny light, there smiles The great defender of the Christian Age Whose words in Latin Augustine employed.” Paradiso, 10, 118–120 (Musa ed., 122). “Augustine made use of . . . Orosius’ Latin treatise, Historiam libri, which was written at the suggestion of the saint, as a means of historical confirmation for his own City of God.” Ibid., 130. As soon as we enter the first truly horrible punishment of hell, in Canto 5 of the Inferno, as Biow notes, Francesca quotes from the Confessions when Augustine, having picked up the Bible and read from it, and having felt the rush of God’s grace upon him, closes the book, converted. 177. The surviving drawings are divided between the Vatican and Berlin collections. Eighty-five sheets belong to the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, and seven to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The drawings are on sheets of sheep’s parchment that include the text; they originally measured about 325 × 475 mm; one sheet, Satan (Inferno, 34, 2), measures 468 × 635 mm. See Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg et al., Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000). 178. See the descriptions of Kenneth Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s Divine Comedy After the Originals in the Berlin Museums and the Vatican (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). 179. Jeffrey Burton Russell, “Hell, Damnation,” in Augustine through the Ages, 423. The beatific vision is a later term (see Chapter 2). 180. Russell, 423, citing the City of God (21, 13) and De Enchiridion (69); Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Scolar, 1984; originally La naissance du Purgatoire [Paris: Gallimard, 1981]). 181. Christine Göttler, Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 69. 182. “‘an[geli]’, holding small tablets (in the lower left an Angel’s tablet is inscribed ‘Sandro/dima/rian/o’, Botticelli’s name); ‘arch[angeli]’, bearing scrolls; ‘princ [ipati]’, wearing sacerdotal stoles; ‘podest [adi]’, carrying orbs and scepters; ‘virtut[i]’, who carry shields emblazoned with a cross; ‘domin[azioni]’, carrying pennons with a similar blazon; ‘tron[i]’, who carry tabors, or tambourines; ‘serafi[ni]’

Notes to pages 51–54

and ‘cherub[ini]’, the uppermost and very faint two circles of winged heads.” At the top of his list of labels he has inscribed “trinit[à]”, to show the Trinity. 183. “very curious, and in some ways disappointing, development . . . ” Clark, 22 (on Canto 2 to Canto 22). 184. See the observations on this drawing of Summers, 19; S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1977). 185. “Reply to Objection 3: Although air as long as it is in a state of rarefaction has neither shape nor color, yet when condensed it can both be shaped and colored as appears in the clouds. Even so the angels assume bodies of air, condensing it by the Divine power in so far as is needful for forming the assumed body.” Summa theologiae, First Part, “Treatise on the Angels” (Questions 50–64), Question 51, Article 2: “Whether angels assume bodies,” in Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FP_Q50_A2.html (accessed on 19 August 2009). 186. Hopper, 109. 187. This is a point made by Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 21. 188. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 21. 189. See also, on the circle and angels, Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2, Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth et al., ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 191–203. 190. Dante con l’espositione di Christophoro Landino, et di Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Marchio Sessa, 1564). Antonfrancesco Doni noted, in his Libraria (1550), that Vellutello “strained his mind, expenses and expended time” in seeing to the engraving of the eighty-seven plates. They may have been the work of Giovanni Britto, who worked as an engraver for Francesco Marcolini in Venice, and they are exceptionally integrated, in terms of their iconography, with Vellutello’s commentary. See Deborah Parker, “Gallery,” The World of Dante (www.worldofdante.org/gallery_vellutello.html). 191. Guariento di Arpo, The Dominations (tempera on panel) (c. 1357) (rectangular panel, 119 × 107 cm) (Musei Civici, Padua). See Chapter 2. 192. Faure (op. cit.) and Christe and Bonvin (op. cit.) link the iconography of the south portal at Chartres and of the cathedral’s window of Saint Apollinaire to Pseudo-Dionysius, but they note the relative singularity of these examples. They also note the comparable iconography of the decoration of the interior of the Baptistery, Florence, and of Piero di Puccio’s fresco in the Camposanto, Pisa (Fig. 11). 193. John Monfasani, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in Mid-Quattrocento Rome,” in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, eds. James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell, Jr. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 189; see also my essay, “Forgery, Faith, and Divine Hierarchy after Lorenzo Valla,” in Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome (Ashgate Visual Culture in Early Modernity), ed. Jill Burke (Surrey, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 245–262. 194. See also Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Three Renaissance Neoplatonists, Cusanus, Ficino & Pico on Mind and Cosmos,” in Supplementum Festivum, 279–298.

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195. Valla’s own rejection of Dionysius was characteristic of him, and it was based on four reasons, according to Monfasani (at least in the first, Neapolitan redaction): the name “Areopagite” denotes not a locus philosophorum, but a locus iudicum; that is, the site in Athens where the city judges sat. The author was, then, a judge, not a philosopher. Second, the author does not “smack of antiquity” (“nec antiquitatem sapit”). Third, the eclipse at the instant of the death of Christ which he claimed to have seen at Athens took place only in Judea, and, fourth, no ancient Greek and Latin authorities knew this author. These points very much resemble the character of Valla’s argumentation in the Oratio. Monfasani, 190–191 (whose four categories I have followed here closely). For Pico, see Chapter 3. 196. Valery Rees, “Ficino’s Advice to Princes,” in Michael J. B. Allen et al., eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 339–357. 197. “Reverend Father, the blessed King Alfonso, your grandfather, recently uttered from heaven a prophecy in the language of angels for your blessed father, King Ferdinand. Marsilio Ficino, caught up by some spirit, was there. He heard and remembered that prophecy uttered by King Alfonso in the language of angels. Today he has translated it for you into the language of men with this advice: first, please read it yourself, then send it to His Serene Highness, your father, so that what Marsilio recently understood from Alfonso with the eyes and ears of the mind alone, he may through our care receive with the ears and eyes of the body as well.” The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–2009), vol. 6/5, 23; Antonietta Iacono, “Il trionfo di Alfonso d’Aragona tra memoria classica e propaganda di corte,” Rassegna Storica Salernitana 51 (2009): 9–57. 198. Antonio Beccadelli, Antonii Panormitae De dictis et factis Alphonsi Regis Aragonum libri quatuor: Commentarium in eosdem Aeneae Sylvvij, quo capitatim cum Alphonsinis contendit. Adiecta sunt singulis libri scholia per D. Iacobum Spiegelium (Basil: Heruagiana, 1538): “Post hos vehebatur lignea ingens turris mirifice ornata, cuius aditum angelus stricto ense custodiebat. . . . Omnium primus angelus ad regem versus in hunc fere modum disseruit: ’Alphonse rex pacis, ego tibi castellum hoc superastantes quatuor inclitas virtutes offero manuque trado, quas quomodo tute semper veneratus et amplexus es, nunc te triumphantem comitari gratanter volunt.’ ” 199. J. Russell Sale, “An Iconographic Program by Marco Parenti,” Renaissance Quarterly 27 (1974): 293–299. 200. Sale, 295–296. 201. “Et perchè gli antichi filosofi dissono che i cieli erano mossi da sustanze separate, et e teologi nostril dichono che e’ sono mossi da angeli, che in sustanza è una medesima chosa, però vi posi quello agnolo in mezzo. . . .” Letter of Marco Parenti to Filippo Strozzi (10 February, 1450), in Sale, 298. 202. See Primo Mobile (Prime Mover), in Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, eds. Jay A. Levenson, Konrad Oberhuber, and Jacquelyn L. Sheehan (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1973), 156, No. 65. I am grateful to J. Russell Sale for this reference. 203. See Keck (31–32) for the outlines of these views. 204. See Joan Barclay Lloyd’s discussion of this image in “The Trinity Amid the Hierarchies of Angels: A Lost Fresco from S. Clemente in Rome and an Iconographic Tradition of the Angelic Choirs,” Arte Cristiana (May–June 1985): 173–174. Aquinas credits Augustine as his major patristic source for

Notes to pages 57–60

the location of angels within the cosmos, closest to God, and beyond the stars (as also noted by Lloyd) in Summa theologiae 4, Question 61, esp. Articles 3 and 4. 205. See Perri Lee Roberts, “St. Gregory the Great and the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece,” Burlington Magazine 127/986 (1985): 295–297. 206. This is the order of Gregory’s Homily 34, which is different from the order in his Moralia 32, 48. See the helpful tables of Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 19. Of note here, too, is the fact that the Archangels are missing, which raises the possibility that they may have been represented nearby in Santa Maria Maggiore, which not only featured the Annunciation in the triumphal arch, but also possessed a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. See my “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’: A Gallic Legacy in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59/4 (1996): 498–522. 207. See Chapter 3. 208. Costa executed his painting in about the same year that the Venetian Confraternity of St. Joseph was founded. Carolyn C. Wilson, St. Joseph in Italian Renaissance Society and Art: New Directions and Interpretations (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2001). As the author points out, the modern title, “Adoration of the Shepherds,” has overshadowed Joseph’s place in the liturgical calendar and his prominence, above all, at the Nativity. 209. Summa de donis Sancti Joseph (1514–1521), in Wilson. 210. Saints Gregory the Great and Matthias (National Gallery of Art, London). This is the argument of Roberts. Pseudo-Dionysius conceived of the descent of divine attributes through the hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Powers, Virtues, Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Gregory, significantly, began with the lowest orders as a reflection of his concern for the impact of angels on the human soul’s ascent: Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. Gregory, like others among the Church Fathers, varied his ordering of the hierarchy; this is his ranking in his influential Homily 34. Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 19; 26–28. 211. See the important analysis of Göttler, “Indulgenced Prints of Saint Gregory’s Miraculous Mass,” in Last Things, 31–70. 212. Bernd Roling, Locutio angelica: Die Diskussion der Engelsprache als Antizipation einer Sprechakttheorie in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008), 50– 52; Joseph, “The Tongues of Men and of Angels.” On Gregory more generally, see Grover A. Zinn, Jr., “Exegesis and Spirituality in the Writings of Gregory the Great,” in Everett Ferguson, ed., Forms of Devotion: Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism (New York/London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 198–210. 213. See Chapter 2. 214. Paradiso, 28, 130–135. In his earlier Convivio, Dante had followed Gregory’s order of angels, rather than that of Pseudo-Dionysius.

2 Wings: Celestial Visions in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance 1.

“The Glory of Virgins & The Nine Orders of Angels,” Tundale’s Vision (1149), in Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante, ed. Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica Press, 1989), 191; see also 252–254. The Irish monk, the narrator of the popular vision of the Irish knight, Tundale, continues (191–192): “What can I say? So much pleasure, so much happiness, so much worthiness is permitted to all. How

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

sublime it is to be among the choirs of angels and saints, to distinguish the praiseworthy numbers of the patriarchs and prophets, to see the army of martyrs clothed in white, to hear the new song of the virgins, to see the glory of the choir of apostles, to deserve the partnership of the confessors, because it surpasses all joy to feel the force of him, the holy and merciful who is the bread of angels and the life of all. . . . In a wonderful way, while they were standing in the same place in which they had been standing before, not turning themselves around, they still saw everything both in front of and behind them. Moreover, not only was it seen but unusual knowledge was given to Tundale so that he also no longer had to ask about anything anymore, since he knew openly and wholly everything that he desired.” Tundale was led on his journey through hell and heaven by his guardian angel. See also Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Source Book (New York/London: Garland, 1993), 210–222; Jan Swango Emerson, “Harmony, Hierarchy, and the Senses in the Vision of Tundal,” in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, eds. Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, O.S.B. (New York/London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 3–46; Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, eds. Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter. Homily 34, in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 34. “Thus the seraphim themselves rise when they set us upright, they walk when they help us to make progress, and they stand when they transfix us in holy understanding.” On the Six Wings of the Cherubim (of which Hugh of Saint-Victor wrote the first part), in Chase, Introduction, Angelic Spirituality, 34. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 81. See the helpful introduction by Ra‘anan S. Bouston and Annette Yoshiko Reed to their coedited volume, Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–15. Of more general studies, see J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). This list is largely that of Bouston and Reed (11), and it is borne out in the chapters of their volume. James J. O’Donnell (in his online commentary) notes a comparable metaphorical vein in Ambrose. According to Pseudo-Augustine’s letter on which the painting is based (a thirteenth-century letter popular in Venice), a supernatural light and fragrance entered Augustine’s study at night at the very moment of Jerome’s death. He had been pondering “how much glory and joy the souls of the blessed have who rejoice with Christ.” Jerome chastised him: Augustine, Augustine, what are you seeking? Do you think that you can put the whole sea in a little vase? Enclose the world in a small fist? . . . Will your eye see what the eye of no man can see? Your ear hear what is received by no ear through sound? . . . What will be the end of an infinite thing? By what measure will you measure the immense? Eusebius of Cremona, Epistola ad Damasum de morte Hieronymi (Venice: Pellegrino Pasquali and Domenico Bertocchi, 1485 [IGI 3730]) as cited by Daniela Ambrosini, “‘Victor Carpathius Fingebat’. Viaggio Intorno e Fuori lo Studio di Sant’Agostino nella Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni,” Studi

Notes to pages 63–64

Veneziani 39 (2000): 47–96, esp. 59; see also Chapter 4 of my Augustine in the Italian Renaissance. 9. “. . . reaching forth unto those things which are before, we were enquiring . . . what sort the eternal life of the saints was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, not hath it entered into the heart of man. But yet we gasped with the mouth of our heart, after those heavenly streams of Thy fountain.” This is a reference to Isaiah 64: 4 and Corinthians 2: 9–10, as noted by Maria Boulding O.S.B, trans., Confessions, 227 n. 96. 10. As they “stood alone, leaning in a certain window,” they came to “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, we were enquiring between ourselves in the presence of Truth, which Thou art, of what sort the eternal life of the saints was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, not hath it entered into the heart of man. But yet we gasped with the mouth of our heart, after those heavenly streams of Thy fountain, the fountain of life, which is with Thee; that being bedewed thence according to our capacity, we might in some sort meditate upon so high a mystery.” Confessions 9, 10, 23 (Pusey translation given by O’Donnell, online commentary). Thereupon, in this “too famous” (O’Donnell) episode, they brought themselves to a point “that the very highest delight of the earthly senses, in the very purest material light” was neither worthy of comparison or mention; for they passed through all bodily things, “even the very heaven whence sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth;” “soaring higher yet, by inward musing, and discourse . . .”, they came to “their own minds, and went beyond them, that we might arrive at that region of never-failing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth, and where life is the Wisdom by whom all these things are made . . . ” (9, 10, 24). Here, they have a glimpse, a touch, of Wisdom, before returning to time; they speculated about the possibility of hushing: “the tumult of the flesh . . . hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the pole of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and not by thinking on self surmount self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatsoever exists only in transition, since if any could hear, all these say, We made not ourselves, but He made us that abideth for ever – If then having uttered this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears to Him who made them, and He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, that we may hear His Word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor Angel’s voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but might hear Whom in these things we love. . . . When we shall all rise again, though we shall not all be changed?” (9, 10, 25). 11. He described this ascent at Ostia, too, less as a “vision” than as an “audition”: “From 7.10.16 to the end of that Bk., the verb vidi occurs six times; Ostia avoids that verb, and the climactic description at 9.10.25 is of an ‘audition’ rather than a ‘vision’ . . . ” O’Donnell also quotes C. Bennett’s view that this “is virtually an allegorized version of the last meeting of Aeneas and his father in Aeneid 6”; that (in O’Donnell’s words) “the garden prospect parallels the green meadow in Hades (Aen. 6. 679, 703) where Anchises meets his son. In both Aen. and conf., the parent already within the pale of death is a guide to the afterlife for the son who is yet in the midst of life.” The emphasis on the sense of hearing has interesting parallels in Carpaccio’s emphasis on music. Fredrika H. Jacobs, “Carpaccio’s Vision of St. Augustine and St. Augustine’s Theories of Music,” Studies in Iconography 6 (1980): 83–93.

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12. O’Donnell, online commentary on Confessions 9, 10, 25. 13. “Much in the narrative is Platonic (with distinct parallels to Bk. 7), but the capstone is Christian and scriptural. The message of A. of 397 is that, in those particular circumstances, himself baptized and accompanied by his mother, an ascent was possible that was better than what he had found through the Platonic books: not different, not uniquely better, not a denial of the excellence of Platonic mysticism, but better. This is high flattery for Platonism, combined with a final regretful suspension of allegiance and transfer of that allegiance to Christianity.” O’Donnell, op. cit. 14. See further my Chapter 4, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance. 15. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 84–90; see also Chapter 4, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, for an analysis of Augustine’s theory of sight. 16. Jeffrey Burton Russell, “Paradise, Heaven,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, 419. I am following this entry closely. 17. Russell, “Paradise,” 419–420. Augustine also made an important distinction between the sky (caelum) and heaven (caelum caeli); “beatific vision”: Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (second ed.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988/2001), 89. 18. Russell, “Paradise,” 420. 19. Russell, “Paradise,” 420. 20. Davide Banzato, Giotto e la pittura del Trecento a Padova (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 21–2; I Musei Civici di Padova: guida, eds. Davide Banzato et al. (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 57–8. The frescoes of the chapel (now the Accademia Galileiana di Scienze Lettere ed Arti ) were restored by Leonetto Tintori. Other panels are now in the collections of the Pinacoteca, Arezzo, and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Armed Angel [Principatus] [wood, 83.8 × 52.1 cm.] [Bequest of Lucy Wallace Porter 1962.279]). The frescoes comprise two rows of continuous narrative, above each of which, set into a frieze, are (now illegible) inscriptions. Underneath the frescoes was a painted series of Gothic arches above a fictive marble socle zone. In the seventeenth century, the windows of the room were enlarged, which also damaged Guariento’s frescoes. See also Da Giotto al Tardogotico: Dipinti dei Musei Civici di Padova del Trecento e della prima metà del Quattrocento, eds. Davide Banzato and Franca Pellegrini (Rome: De Luca, 1989), 71–72. In 1779, according to d’Arcais’s entry in this volume, part of the palace complex, including the chapel, was ceded to the Academy, and at this time, one wall was demolished. In 1902, the panels entered the collection of the Museo Bottacin. Additional panels are in the Museo Civico Malaspina, Pavia, and the Castello del Catjo, Padua, while a Cherub and an Angel with a Shield and Lance appeared for public sale in the 1980s. In the nineteenth century, other panels were recorded in private collections, possibly those same two panels. 21. Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Guariento: Tutta la Pittura (Venice: Alfieri, 1974), 25–30; Da Giotto al Tardogotico, 14–15; 65–74; Figs. 23–51. 22. In her catalogue entry (Da Giotto al Tardogotico, 72–73), d’Arcais summarizes these proposals. 23. See, for example, John Shearman, “Raphael’s Clouds, and Correggio’s,” Studi su Raffaello: Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi (Urbino-Firenze 6–14 aprile 1984), eds. Micaela Sambucco Hamoud and Maria Letizia Strocchi (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987), 657–668; Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the

Notes to pages 69–74

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chapter 4, “Domes,” 149–191. Irene Hueck, “Der Besuch Karls IV. in Padua und die Bilder Guarientos aus der Kapelle der Carraresen,” Umenì 41/2 (1993): 67–69. Hueck, 63–75. Charles IV had made Giacomo II da Carrara imperial vicar in 1348: “More than simply a token of Charles’ friendship or symbol of prestige, the imperial vicariate brought legitimation of Carrara rule over Padua, broader authority in the affairs of northeast Italy, and the possibility of greater independence from Venice.” Benjamin G. Kohl, Padua under the Carrara, 1318–1405 (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 93. On this same visit to Italy, Charles named Francesco da Carrara knight and vassal of the empire; he, in turn, knighted a number of his close Paduan allies. Charles received the Iron Crown in Milan in January, and the imperial crown in Rome in the following year. Ibid., 97. Christe and Bonvin, “Les neufs choeurs angéliques,” 67–99. The authors note the different versions of the orders among Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory the Great’s Moralia, and his Homily 34. The Eremitani cycle corresponds to Pseudo-Dionysius and Homily 34, which was more influential, although the Homily itself omitted the Dominations. The third through seventh orders vary among these sources. This is the hypothesis of Gino Fogolari, “Le gerarchie angeliche negli affreschi scoperti agli Eremitani di Padova,” Bollettino d’arte 26/2 (1932): 81–89. See Otto Demus, The Mosaic Decoration of San Marco, Venice, ed. Herbert L. Kessler (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Plates 40; 41; 44a. These show the six-winged Cherubim at the base of the cupola. Cf. also Joseph Thrown into the Pit and Brethren Feasting of the first Joseph cupola in the atrium of San Marco with Guariento’s fresco of Joseph. Reading clockwise, the Cherub with ten wings holds a disk, inscribed “SIENCIE [sic] PLENITUDO;” a crowned Throne, seated on a globe, holds a lilied scepter and scroll (inscribed “TRONIS”); a Domination, who wears armor, transfixes a devil with his spear while holding scales containing a soul; he is inscribed “DOMINACIONES;” an Angel (inscribed “ANGELI”) and an Archangel (inscribed “ARKANGELO”) hold bound souls above a cave containing others; a Virtue, inscribed “VIRTUTES,” bears a scepter as he leans over a skeleton by a flaming rock and a spring; a Power (inscribed “POTESTATES”) binds a devil in chains; a Principality (on whose scroll is written “PRI[N]CIPATU[S]”), dressed in armor, bears a sword, and is seated on a stool decorated with animal heads; and (nearer the Cross on the altar below) a Seraph holds a scepter and scroll inscribed “SERAPHIN,” as he sits on a cushioned bench. Nine half-figured angels with torches encircle the blue sphere housing Christ in the center of the dome. He is flanked by two red and gold Seraphim with six wings (following Isaiah 6: 1–2). The Archangels held balances for the weighing of souls, and they stood above the lowest order, the Angels, who waited to escort those judged to heavenly Jerusalem. Enrica Cozzi, “Gli affreschi della ‘Cappella Angelorum’ agli Eremitani di Padova,” Arte Veneta 35 (1981): 30. See now John Richards, Petrarch’s Influence on the Iconography of the Carrara Palace in Padua: The Conflict Between Ancestral and Antique Themes in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).

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Notes to pages 74–77

31. On Giles of Rome who, from 1285 until 1291, occupied the first chair of the Augustinian Order at the University of Paris, see esp. Suarez-Nani, Connaissance et langage des anges selon Thomas d’Aquin et Gilles de Rome, 77–178; 209–247. 32. Giles of Rome, Theorems on Existence and Essence (Theoremata de esse et essentia), trans. Michael V. Murray, S. J. (Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation No. 7) (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1952); Giles of Rome (Egidius Romanus), Ms., Quaestiones disputatae de esse et essentia; Quaestiones de mensura angelorum (France, 1325–1375), Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vat. Lat. 847. 33. The date and the name of Antonio Colonna are recorded in an inscription above the entrance. On the oratory, see G. Alessandri, Appunti sull’antichissimo Ospedale della SS. Annunziata di Riofreddo (Rome, 1973); Lidia Banchi, “Gli affreschi dell’Oratorio della SS. Annunziata a Riofreddo,” Le Arti 5 (1942/1943): 143–149; Franca Fedeli Bernardini, “L’ospedale-deposito di Riofreddo,” in L’antico ospedale di Santo Spirito. Dall’istituzione papale alla sanità del terzo millennio (Rome: Il Veltro, 2001), 326–328; M. Burri Rossi, “L’Ospedale della SS. Annunziata di Riofreddo,” Bollettino dell’Unione Storia e Arte 1–2, Anno 17 (Rome, 1974); Alessandra Caffari, “Riofreddo e i suoi signori dal XIV al XVIII secolo,” Atti e memorie della Società Tiburtina di Storia e d’Arte 72 (1999): 101–141; Remo Caffari, Appunti sulla chiesa della SS. Annunziata in Riofreddo (Roma) e sugli affreschi in essa esistenti (Rome, 1977); A. Pinelli, “La pittura a Roma e nel Lazio nel Quattrocento,” in La pittura in Italia – Il Quattrocento, vol. 2 (Milan, 1987), 422ff.; Serena Romano, Eclissi di Roma. Pittura murale a Roma e nel Lazio da Bonifacio VIII a Martino V (1295–1431) (Rome: Argos, 1992), 477–482; Adolfo Venturi, “Di Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino,” L’Arte (1910): 377–381. 34. Caffari, “Riofreddo e i suoi signori,” 101; 103. 35. Helen Geddes, “Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino,” in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T003650 (accessed 2 August 2009). Arcangelo has also been credited with work in Urbino, at the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista, alongside Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni da San Severino. The angels at the sides of the throne in the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels (Pinacoteca e Museo Civici, Camerino) attributed to him share stylistic mannerisms, such as long, individually colored feathers in their wings. 36. On the San Clemente program, see my chapter, “The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Rome, Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 37. This correlation may not be a coincidence, should the artist at Riofreddo have been to Rome. In the upper basilica at Assisi, a similar effect can be seen in the angel’s wings at the right, below the rose window, in the fresco of the Ascension of Christ. Here, too, in the spandrels of the vault of the basilica, four Doctors of the Church are paired with saints, each seated in elaborately conceived, colorful study units. 38. The circular formation of the angelic composition at Chartres (but not the comparison with Riofreddo) is noted by Christe and Bonvin, 75. 39. Given the artist’s conflation of several orders, some interpretive flexibility is reasonable, especially given the fact that the Archangels are missing, with the important exception of Gabriel in the Annunciation. 40. Lloyd, 167–180. The inscriptions at San Clemente are enlightening: “Seraphim ardenti d’amore./Cherubin scientia de Deo./Throni sedia che Dio le giudica./

Notes to pages 77–82

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

Principatus hanno a gubernare l’universo./Dominationes hanno a commandare all’altri angeli./Potestates hanno Potenza sopra li dannati dell’inferno./ Virtutes hanno potestà di far miracoli./Archangeli hanno a dinuntiare li secreti di Deo./ Angeli hanno da guardare e portare le anime in paradise.” B. Mellini (c. 1667), in Lloyd, 167. Lloyd, 170. See my article, “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 506–510. Vitaliano Tiberia, Antoniazzo Romano per il Cardinale Bessarione a Roma (Todi: Ediart, 1992); Carol M. Richardson, Reclaiming Rome: Cardinals in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009), 220–232. Effective as a saintly force against the Turks, St. John must also have been dear to Bessarion as his name saint and as an intercessor in death, as Richardson notes. Before Bessarion, the chapel contained St. Eugenia’s relics, as well as those of Claudia, her mother. Gill, “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 507 n. 24; Peers, 165–171. The inscription in the chapel records the site as “Monte Tumba.” For the Greek and Byzantine origins of the cult of St. Michael, see Olga Rojdestvensky, Le culte de Saint Michel et le moyen-âge latin (Paris: A. Picard, 1922); Peers, esp. 6–11; 157–193. Peers analyzes other miracles, including that at Chonae (formerly Colossae), in western Asia Minor, from which descended the shrine on Monte Gargano. Michael was no less popular in the West, especially from the Carolingian period onward, when churches, chapels, and altars were dedicated to him. Keck, 170; 173; 179–184; 201–207. In the upper church at Assisi, in the south transept, he is shown in fresco in combat with a dragon. Gill, “ ‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 506–507. Gill, “ ‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 508 n. 26. Bessarion’s message of unity seems underscored by the participation of these persons, particularly the della Rovere uncle and nephew for whose family SS. Apostoli was a favored church. Shortly before he became pope in 1471, Sixtus IV appointed Bessarion legate to France. See also Egmont Lee, Sixtus IV and Men of Letters (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978), 18–30. P. Gout, Le Mont-Saint-Michel. Histoire de l’abbaye et de la ville. Etude archéologique et architecturale des monuments, vol. 1 (Paris, 1910), 473; 351 ff. The commemoration of this feast, the Festum Angelorum, coincided with the feast at Monte Gargano. Gill, “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 508–510 (and further bibliography). Gill, “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 514. Bessarion was not the only Roman churchman in his day to draw on the connections between eastern icons of the Virgin and St. Michael. Gill, “‘Where the Danger Was Greatest’,” 514–516; Peers, op. cit. It was Michael, too, who announced to the Virgin her approaching death. This is eloquently expressed by Peers (180): “Descriptions from miracle stories examined here do not provide stable models for representing the Archangel as they can for human saints. Like images, miracle stories provide a means for apprehension that not only compels contemplation but also denies resemblance and complete discernment of the archangelic subject.” Exodus 14: 24: the Angel of the Lord led the Israelites out of the desert “through the pillar of fire from earth to heaven.” Peers, 181–184.

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Notes to pages 82–85

54. In his first will, of 17 February 1464, Bessarion specified that the altar wall represent Christ enthroned, the Madonna, SS. Michael Archangel, John the Baptist, and Eugenia. He himself would be shown kneeling at Christ’s feet above his coat of arms. See, most recently, Richardson, 221–222. 55. Peers, 184–185; 193: “Texts exploit recognizable patterns from scripture to give the descriptions of events and appearances structure but at the same time deny any essential descriptiveness in their evocation of elemental and uniform wonders. In a comparable way, images depend on their non-resembling qualities to attract and lead the viewer to recognition of a higher, invisible reality. Michael transcends the ability of words and images to describe such a reality but it is this inability that attracts and compels contemplation.” 56. See Peers’ analysis (49–52; Fig. 11) of the Icon of the Virgin and Child, Flanked by Saints Theodore and George, Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai. 57. “[Michael is] rendered as a youth of Apollonian beauty, gracious in the movement of the body which is shown in full plasticity under a garment which, in classical fashion, clings to the body and whose folds combine a rhythmic flow with modeling power.” Kurt Weitzmann, “The Classical in Byzantine Art as a Mode of Individual Expression,” in Peers, 53; Fig. 15. 58. Peers, 125–128. 59. The Greek Anthology, ed. W. R. Paton, 5 vols.(London, 1927), vol. 1: 34; trans. C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire. 312–1453. Sources and Documents (Toronto, 1986), in Peers, 62. 60. John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition), vol. 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 210–229; “A Tale of Two Books: Bessarion’s In Calumniatorum Platonis and George of Trebizond’s Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis,” Renaissance Studies 22 (2008): 1–15. 61. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 86. 62. Cf. the Gothic example of the Coronation panel in Turin (Galleria Sabauda), showing the Nine Orders; also their sculpted appearance adjacent to the personification of Astronomy on the exterior of Florence’s campanile. 63. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 84–86. More recently, scholars have identified the location of the painting as the Badia, as opposed to the Palmieri chapel in San Pier Maggiore where Vasari saw it. Rolf Bagemihl, “Francesco Botticini’s Palmieri Altar-Piece,” The Burlington Magazine 138/1118 (May 1996): 308–314. 64. This is a point made by Bagemihl, 309. 65. Bagemihl, 309; See esp. Catherine King, “The Dowry Farms of Niccolosa Serragli and the Altarpiece of the Assumption in the National Gallery, London (1126) ascribed to Francesco Botticini,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50 (1987): 275–278. 66. Maury D. Feld, “The Sibyls of Subiaco: Sweynheym and Pannartz and the Editio Princeps of Lactantius,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, vol. 1 (Florence: Villa I Tatti/Giunti Barbera, 1985), 301–316; Libro del Poema Chiamato ‘Citta di Vita’ Composto da Matteo Palmieri Florentino, ed. Margaret Rooke, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 1–2 (Oct. 1926–Jan. 1927); 1–2 (Oct. 1927–Jun. 1928); G. Boffito, “L’eresia di Matteo Palmieri, ‘Cittadino Fiorentino’,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana (1901): 1–69; Bagemihl, 311–312. An excellent brief biography of Palmieri, bibliography, and background are provided by Bruno Cumbo, La Città di Vita di Matteo

Notes to pages 85–88

67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

Palmieri: Ipotesi su una fonte quattrocentesca per gli affreschi di Michelangelo nella Volta Sistina (Palermo: :duepunti, 2006), Chapter 1, “La Città di Vita di Matteo Palmieri,” 16–47; see also A. Mita Ferrero, Matteo Palmieri: Una biografia intellettuale (Genoa: Name, 2005); Claudio Finzi, Matteo Palmieri: Dalla “Vita civile” alla “Città di vita” (Rome: Guiffrè, 1984); Matthew Taylor, Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475): Florentine Humanist and Politician (Florence: European University Institute [thesis], 1986), esp. Chapter 5, “The Città di Vita and the Heresy of Matteo Palmieri,” 280–328. Bagemihl, 311; see Chapter 1. Città di vita, Book One, Chapter 5, in Rooke, vol. 1, ix; 24. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 84–85. Cumbo gives a summary of the poem (La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 30–32); the full text is given in Rooke, op. cit. Palmieri was likely a particular admirer of Jerome’s Letter 124, Ad Avitum, which closely follows Origen’s On First Principles; also of Origen’s Perì archon, which Ficino himself cited directly in his De Christiana Religione, where he recorded, too, his admiration for the ancient theologian. Ficino also admired Palmieri, whom he called “poeta theologo” in the 1470s. Cumbo, op. cit., 33–35. See Taylor, 291–292. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 32. In 400, the Council of Alexandria condemned Origen as a heretic, and Pope Gelasius proscribed him again in 494. He was condemned again in 553 by the Fifth Council at Constantinople. He figures in the apocryphal Decretum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis: “Origenis nonnulla opuscula quae vir beatissimus Hieronymus non repudiat, legenda suscipimus. Reliqua autem omnia cum auctore suo dicimus esse renuenda.” In D. P. Walker, “Origène en France au début du XVIe siècle,” in Courants religieux et humanisme à la fin du XVe et au début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 103; Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Rooke, in her introduction (vol. 1), and Cumbo, in Chapter 1 of his La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, give excellent histories. Walker, 103–104; Clark. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, pl. XL, 53, fols. 51v–56; esp. 53–54v, noted by Bagemihl, 311 n. 20. Bagemihl notes that this pattern, perhaps an Augustinian one, is also true in Nardo di Cione’s fresco of Paradise in the Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella. As Bagemihl notes (311 n. 22), Dati (fol. 53v) wrote that stars and human souls are innumerable. Botticini was familiar with literary and humanist circles in Florence. Bagemihl, 311; he notes the classic study by Edgar Wind, “The Revival of Origen,” in Dorothy Miner, ed., Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene (Princeton, 1954), 412ff; 418; 420. The Badia’s library housed two works by Origen. See also Taylor, esp. 312. Bagemihl, 311–312; an extract of the text is also given in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 27: “In quo, si qui poetice fortasse nimis dicta quidam accusant, quasi a christiane fidei veritate dissonantia, meminisse debent pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi sempre fuit data potestas, nec tamen inde licet arguere eos ut scripserint its senisse, sed voluptatis aut docendi gratia ab eis

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Notes to pages 88–89

multa narrari . . .” Oratio habita in funere Mathei Palmerii per Alamannum Rinuccinum, 15 aprilis 1475, in Lettere e orazioni, ed. V. R. Giustiniani (Florence: Olschki, 1953), 78–85. 79. “E di tale invenzione nel suo poema scritto in versi toscani ad imitazione di Dante che se non fussi caduto in alcuna eresia potea facilmente vivere,” in R. Cardini, ed., Scritti critici e teorici, vol. 1 (Rome, 1974), 120–121, quoted in Bagemihl (312 n. 30), who notes a record of the burning of Palmieri’s effigy, as well as defenses, condemnations, and rumors into the following century. 80. “Vanno per l’aire come uccel vagando Altre spezie di spiriti folletti Che non furon fedel né rei già quando Fu stabilito il numer degli eletti: Non so se ‘l mio Palmier qui venne errando Che par di corpo in corpo ancor gli metti, Onde e’ punge la mente con mille agora Esser prima Euforbio e poi Pittagora.”

81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86.

Morgante, 24, 109 (ed. D. De Robertis [Florence: Sansoni, 1962, 681]), in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 37–38. Later writers, such as Niccolò Machiavelli (Asino, 1549), shared with Palmieri a common inspiration in Dante. Intersecting themes among their works suggest that Palmieri’s poem seems to have had a significant afterlife. Cristoforo Fiorentino (detto Altissimo), who died in 1515, among others, praised and defended Palmieri whose poems, he said, had been “damned.” In Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 37–40. In the seventeenth century, the Ferrarese Jesuit, Giulio Negri, wrote that, in the Città di Vita, Palmieri: “ad imitazione della Commedia di Dante, parlando degli angioli, trascorse, non ben fondato teologo, nell’errore di Pitagora e di Origene della trasmigrazione delle anime, insegnando che queste altre non erano che gli angioli mantenutisi neutrali nella lor ribellione che con circolazione continua animavano i corpi umani mutando albergo dall’uno all’altro.” In Boffito, 18. Tommaso Sardi, Anima Peregrina, in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 39. Sardi (1460–1517) was a Dominican friar and teacher of theology. I capricci di Bottaio, in Dialoghi, ed. R. Tissoni (Bari: Laterza, 1967), 57, in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 41–42. See Chapter 3. It was only under Leo X, through the Florentine Academy, that Palmieri’s work is reliably recorded as sanctioned, including a record of corrections made to the Vatican manuscript by the Domenican, Antonio da Cortona. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 44–45. These corrections had to do with the question of the third of the angels who had not chosen, and who lived in the Elysian fields before descending to earth. Cumbo relies on A. Mita Ferraro, op. cit., 450; see also Taylor, esp. 308–312. See Bagemihl’s sensitive formal analysis (313); L. Venturini (112–113) notes the miniatures of the manuscript of Città di Vita in the Laurentian Library (Pluteo, XL, 53). Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 28–29. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 28–29. “Vide animas illas quos dixi esse in elyseis quemadmodum per planetas descendunt in corpora & in unoqioq

Notes to pages 89–92

87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95.

planeta capiunt impressiones animales iuxta planetae naturam. Deinde ad elementa venientes formant corpora cum elementorum qualitatibus. Dum in corpore vivunt ducunt ab angelis bono scilicet aut malo ut alias tibi praedixi. Per hanc peregrinationem si eam perficit anima quadraginta conficit mansiones de quibus scriptum est. Qual amabilia sunt tabernacula tua domine. Cum hoc ille dixisset. Gaudeo Matthaeus dixit haec cognovisse & tibi habeo gratias. Sed quid vis faciam. Canas haec inquit tertiario versu ut Dantes fecit. Non valerem respondit nec unq tales versus composui. Incipe inquit bene vertet deus. Tum mattheus ad illum unde haec mihi nota erunt. Statim ille tres exhibens coram libros hos legito inquit. Tum Mattheus titulos legens inquit. Si tu adiuveris legam. & iuvabo ille subiungens evanuit. Duae haec visiones fuerunt scribendi causa & etiam operis materia.” Extracted from Appendix A, “Circumstances Which Inspired the Poem. From Dati’s Introduction to the Laurentian Copy (First Published by Bandini),” in Rooke, ed., vol. 2, 262. See Chapter 4, “Augustine’s Light,” in Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 125–147. Bruno Cumbo, “Il ‘disegno’ di Matteo Palmieri per l’Assunzione della Vergine di Francesco Botticini,” Gli scrittori d’Italia: Il patrimonio e la memoria della tradizione letteraria come risorsa primaria – XI Congresso dell’ADI (Naples, September 2007) (Acquaviva Picena, 2008), available at http://www.italianisti.it/FileServices/17% 20Cumbo%20Bruno.pdf. Cumbo notes Palmieri’s wishes, expressed in a lost chartula of the Laurentian Library manuscript. Palmieri had consigned it, sealed, to Florence’s Arte dei Notai. The author has proposed (La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri) that the poem was a principal source for the iconography of the Sistine Ceiling, an interpretation that reinforces arguments for an Augustinian reading of the program, even if one might be wary of assigning a single literary inspiration. Annales, ed. G. Scaramella, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 26/1 (Città di Castello, 1905–1916), 172, quoted in Taylor, 283. Taylor (283) also notes Palmieri’s observation of a classical scene in which the Emperor Octavian and the Sibyl appear, and in which the Sibyl predicts the birth of Christ. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 26. “e tutto col disegno datogli [Sandro Botticelli] da Matteo, ch’era litterato e valentuomo; la quale opera egli con maestria e finitissima diligenza dipinse. . . . Ma con tutto che quest’opera sia, e che ella dovesse vincere la invidia, furono però alcuni malevoli et detrattori, che, non potendo dannarla in altro, dissero che Matteo e Sandro gravemente vi avevano peccato di eresia; il che, se è vero o non è vero non se ne aspetta il giudizio a me; basta che le figure che Sandro vi fece, veramente sono da lodare, per la fatica ch’è durò nel girare i cerchi de’ cieli, e tramezzare tra figure e figure d’angeli e scorci e vedute in diversi modi diversamente; e tutto condotto con buono disegno.” Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ Più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori e Architetti (1550), in Cumbo, “Il ‘disegno’ di Matteo Palmieri;” see Le Vite, vol. 3, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1878), 314–315. See J. F. Sollier, “The Communion of Saints,” Catholic Encyclopedia On-Line (1908). On the kiss, see my discussion of Thomas Gallus’s affective angelic spirituality, in general, and his Prologue to the Third Commentary on the Song of Songs, in particular, in Chapter 1; see also Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 235–239. Russell, A History of Heaven, 86. He contrasts this with the basileia, the kingdom of God, in the East. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993).

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Notes to pages 92–99

96. Russell, “Paradise,” 420. 97. Russell, “Paradise,” 420. 98. Russell, “Paradise,” 420. 99. Cf. Patricia Rubin, “Hierarchies of Vision: Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin from San Domenico, Fiesole,” Oxford Art Journal 27/2 (2004): 137–153. Fra Angelico perhaps suggests this rather subtly in the elevated, pink-robed musician angels closer to the throne, beside those in blue, that is, by associative reference to the Seraphim and Cherubim. 100. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 146, quoting Caesarius of Heisterbach, in Cynthia Hahn, “Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 170. 101. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 146; Hahn, 175. Hahn discusses the papal constitution of 1336, which treated whether Christians would see God with corporeal eyes after the Resurrection, and a painting (Omne Bonum, “Visio Dei”) delineating the path of divine illumination from God. 102. “The clouds of corporeal similitudes do not cease to occur in human cogitation.” De Trinitate 14, 21, 40. 103. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 146–147; City of God 20, 29, in Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions,” Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 141. See also City of God 22, 29. 104. Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 84: “. . . receiving a perfect knowledge of the Infallible Truth and seeing God as he is in triple guise, first in his corporeal form, then in his spiritual form, which they perceive by grace, that grace being defined by some as a certain light and emanation of his countenance when he looks on his own, and finally in celestial form, which is his own form in glory.” 105. McDannell and Lang, 60. 106. Summa theologiae 3, 8, 4. 107. Defined as: “the spiritual solidarity which binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints in heaven in the organic unity of the same mystical body under Christ its head, and in a constant interchange of supernatural offices. The participants in that solidarity are called saints by reason of their destination and of their partaking of the fruits of the Redemption (1 Corinthians 1:2 – Greek Text) . . . St. Thomas teaches (III: 8: 4) that the angels, though not redeemed, enter the communion of saints because they come under Christ’s power and receive of His gratia capitis. The solidarity itself implies a variety of inter-relations: within the Church Militant, not only the participation in the same faith, sacraments, and government, but also a mutual exchange of examples, prayers, merits, and satisfactions; between the Church on earth on the one hand, and purgatory and heaven on the other, suffrages, invocation, intercession, veneration.” Sollier. 108. McDannell and Lang, 60–61 (quoted in ibid.). Both Ambrose and Augustine knew Cicero’s On Old Age and Scipio’s Dream. 109. Frank A. James III, 170, in Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 202. 110. Quoted in Marcia B. Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination,” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 91.

Notes to pages 100–103

3. Bodies and Voices: Annunciation and Heavenly Harmonies 1. Umiltà of Faenza, On the Holy Angels, Sermon Four, in Chase, ed., Angelic Spirituality, 151. 2. Keck, 171. See Voragine’s discussion of the Annunciation: “The third reason [that the Annunciation should precede the Incarnation] is that reparation was to be made for the fall of the angels. The Incarnation made reparation not only for human sin but for the ruin of the fallen angels. Therefore the angels were not to be excluded; and as womankind was not excluded from knowledge of the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, neither was the angelic messenger excluded. God made both of these mysteries known through angels, the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene.” “The Annunciation of the Lord,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 196–197. 3. Keck, 171. In 1269, Bonaventure advised that members of his order follow Francis in offering the Ave Maria with the ringing of the evening bell. See also Henri Leclerq, “Marie (Je vous salue),” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, vol. 10, part 2 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1932), 2041–2062. 4. Ann van Dijk, “The Angelic Salutation in Early Byzantine and Medieval Annunciation Imagery,” Art Bulletin 81/3 (Sept. 1999): 154–162; esp. 421–422. 5. Keck, 171. 6. Purgatorio 10, 34–45; Paradiso 31, 130–132; 32, 94–96; 103–105; cf. Inferno 7, 11f; Purgatorio 13, 51; Paradiso 4, 46f; Paradiso 4, 47; 9, 13; 14, 36; 23, 94–110. See Keck, 171; 237 n. 35. Other than Gabriel, Beatrice refers only to Michael and Raphael, and these angels are “examples of the church’s iconographic ‘condescension’ to human understanding.” Cornish (44), referring to Paradiso 4, 46–48. 7. “On How to Prepare for the Celebration of the Mass,” in Keck, 173. 8. Keck, 173–174. 9. Keck, 173. 10. Keck, 190, citing Johann Huizinga on the saints. 11. Keck, 191. The author refers to Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schönau, and Gertrude the Great of Helfta, among others. 12. Boethius of Dacia was an Aristotelian in Paris (c. 1270) who proposed that a dream of an angel could be explained by physical processes in the human body. This proposition was included in the Condemnations of 1277. Keck, 190. 13. Keck, 190. 14. Horst Wenzel, “Die Verkündigung an Maria: Zur Visualisierung des Wortes in der Szene oder: Schriftgeschichte im Bild,” in Maria in der Welt: Marienverehrung im Kontext der Sozialgeschichte 10–18 Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Opitz et al. (Zurich: Chronos Books, 1993), 23–52. 15. See Kristin Phillips-Court, “Framing the Miracle in Feo Belcari’s Rapresentazione quando la Nostra Donna Vergine Maria fu annunziata dell’Angelo Gabriello,” Annali d’italianistica 25 (“Literature, Religion and the Sacred”) (2007): 233–236. 16. In Phillips-Court, 233. The author proposes that Piero’s fresco (San Francesco, Arezzo; 1452–1466) is brought to mind by Isabella’s description, though the correspondences with this particular work are perhaps less precise than she suggests. On dramatic performances that recreated heaven and angels, see also

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17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Peter Meredith, “‘Some High Place’: Actualizing Heaven in the Middle Ages,” in Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, eds. Muessig and Putter, 139–154. Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” MLN 91/6 (Dec. 1976): 1473–1499. RSV. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972/ 1988), 45–56. Baxandall, 48–56. Sandro Botticelli, Cestello Annunciation (tempera on panel) (c. 1489–1490) (150 × 156 cm) (Uffizi); Fra Carnevale, Annunciation (c. 1445) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC); Alessio Baldovinetti, Annunciation (tempera on wood) (1447) (167 × 137 cm) (Uffizi); Fra Angelico, Annunciation (tempera on wood) (c. 1440) (Convent of S. Giovanni, Montecarlo/now in S. Maria delle Grazie, San Giovanni Val d’Arno); Antonello da Messina, Virgin of the Annunciation (oil on panel) (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). See also Don Denny, The Annunciation From the Right: From Early Christian Times to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1977) on the shift to the Annunciation from the right in the late fourteenth century. Baxandall had even more profound things to say about words and images in his study of Giotto, and in light of humanist Latin discourse about the radical properties of Early Renaissance art. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971/1986); see also his Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1987). Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et Figuration (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); see the review by Alexander Nagel in Art Bulletin 78/3 (Sept. 1996): 559–565. See Chapter 1; Joseph, 133–134; Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1306), which was not published until 1529. Filippino Lippi, Gabriel from the Annunciation; Virgin from the Annunciation (wood) (1483–1484) (diameter: 110 cm) (Museo Civico, San Gimignano). “Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum;” Simone Martini (with Lippo Memmi), The Annunciation and the Two Saints (tempera on wood) (1333) (265 × 305 cm) (Uffizi, Florence). Cf. Psalm 104: 4; Hebrews 1: 7; Van Dijk, 420. Another example of Gabriel’s wings as peacock feathers appears in Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation (The Frick Collection, New York). Cathleen S. Hoeniger, “Cloth of Gold and Silver: Simone Martini’s Techniques for Representing Luxury Textiles,” Gesta 30/2 (1991): 154–162; Van Dijk. Enzel, op. cit.; Roger Tarr, “‘Visibile parlare’: The Spoken Word in FourteenthCentury Central Italian Painting,” Word and Image 13 (1997): 223–244. Fra Angelico, Cortona Annunciation (1433–1434) (tempera on panel) (175 × 180 cm) (Museo Diocesano, Cortona; formerly San Domenico). His words read, from left to right (beginning with the lower text): “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1: 35); her response, upside down, from right to left: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1: 38) [from top to bottom: “SPS & SVP VEIET ITE;” “ECCE ACILLA DN VBV TVVM;” “VIRT ATISI OBVBRABIT TIBI” (without abbreviations)].

Notes to pages 112–116

33. In Judeo-Christian tradition, Gabriel is one of the few angels, along with Michael and Lucifer, who is identified by name. He appears to Daniel, to announce a Messiah, as well as to Zacharias. Gabriel’s identity, from the comparative point of view, is also complex, reflected in his often possessing multiple wings. In Islam, Jibril/Gabriel commands the province of words. He is the angel of Truth, and dictated the Qur’an to Mohammed. That Mary was a virgin at the conception of Jesus is a tenet of Islam. 34. Charles de Tolnay, “The Music of the Universe,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 4 (1953): 82–104. Lorenzo Monaco paints a similar set of starry blue bands, curving as arcs, at the base of the throne in his Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi). In front of these bands, three musical angels – two singers and an organ player – perform. 35. Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 310 n. 96. 36. Susan Rankin, “ ‘Naturalis Concordia vocum cum planetis’: Conceptualizing the Harmony of the Spheres in the Early Middle Ages,” in Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music), eds. Susannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2005): 3–19. 37. Psalms 147, 4–5; 150, 1; 148, 3; the quotation is from Psalm 19, 105. All are given in De Tolnay, 84. 38. In the halo of the Archangel, counter-clockwise: “AVE.MARIA.GRATIA.PLENA. DNS.TECV.” In the halo of the Virgin, clockwise: “ECCE ANCILLA.DOMINI. FIAT.M$M.” On the book lying near the door: “FEMIA / CIRCI / DABIT / VIRV [M] / IEREM / IA PHA / 31.” On the book held by the Virgin: “ECCE VIR / GO CONC / IPIET.” Across the base of the main panel, on the frame dividing it from the predella: “O BENE FECVNDA VIRGINITAS QVE NOVO I[N]AVDITOQ[U] E GENERE ET MATER DICI POSSIT ET VIRGO.” These transcriptions are also confirmed by The Walters Art Museum on their website. 39. Ezekiel, 1: 24: “like the thunder of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sounds of a host;” Isaiah, 6: 2: “Above . . . stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, [is] the LORD of hosts: the whole earth [is] full of his glory;” Luke, 2, 13: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” 40. Confessions, 8, 19–26. 41. Aegidius Carlerius, “Tractatus de duplici ritu cantus ecclesiasti in divinis officiis,” in D. Cullington, ed., That Liberal and Virtuous Art: Three Humanist Treatises on Music: Aegidius Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris, Carlo Valgulio (Belfast: University of Ulster, 1999), 33–34; Günter Berghaus, “Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and Their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10/2 (Autumn 1992): 43–70. 42. Cosmé Tura, The Virgin and Child Enthroned (oil and tempera on poplar) (mid-1470s) (National Gallery of Art, London). 43. “Complexum effectuum musicus,” in That Liberal and Virtuous Art, 9. See Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival, ed. Edward E. Lowinsky in collaboration with Bonnie J. Blackburn (London: Oxford University Press, 1976),

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44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Chap. 6: “Performance Practice;” esp. Frank A. D’Accone, “The Performance of Sacred Music in Italy during Josquin’s Time, ca. 1475–1525,” 601–626. On the “round dance,” the Cantoria, and the Mystic Nativity, see Sharon Fermor, “On the Question of Pictorial ‘Evidence’ for Fifteenth-Century Dance Technique,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 5/2 (Autumn 1987): 19–21. On the meaning of the Mystic Nativity, see Ronald W. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 2 vols. (London: Elek, 1978). Françoise Syson Carter, “Celestial Dance: A Search for Perfection,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 5/2 (Autumn 1987): 3–17; see also her “Number Symbolism and Renaissance Choreography,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10/1 (Spring 1992): 21–39. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1895), vol. 8, St. Basil: Letters and Select Works, 110–111, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 8. The Fathers of the Church. St. Basil: Ascetical Works, trans. M. Wagner (Washington, DC, 1962), 11–12, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 9. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 9. Vita S. Dionysi, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Fr. 2090–2092, Dionysius Writing “The Celestial Hierarchy” (1317), in De Tolnay, 90–93; 90 n. 23; Fig. 11. De Tolnay, 90. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 9–10. Each of the choirs participates in the divine so that the three lower orders transmit Purification; the second, middle orders dispense Illumination, while the highest orders transmit Divine Knowledge: “in perpetual purity they encompass His eternal Knowledge in that most high and eternal angelic dance, rapt in the bliss of manifold blessed contemplation, and irradiated with pure and primal splendours.” Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology and The Celestial Hierarchies (Brook, 1949), 49, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 10. The Celestial Hierarchies, 69, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 11. It was in his Divine Names that Pseudo-Dionysius spelt out the categories of movement, as Carter (“Celestial Dance,” 11) notes. For Lucian, Earth and Love (Eros) were manifest at Creation, because “the concord of heavenly spheres, the interlacing of the errant planets with the fixed stars, their rhythmic agreement and timed harmony are proofs that Dance was primordial.” Lucian, ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon, 8 vols. (Loeb, 1936), vol. 5, 7, “De Saltatione,” in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 4. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 4. Berghaus, op. cit. Following Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Francesco di Giorgio, Robert Fludd (1574–1637) made quite explicit the links among the cosmos, orders of angels, elements, and human persons, including the soul, and with respect to music. Ibid., 46–51. The Enneads, trans. S. Mackenna (1956), 3, 6, 2, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 5–6. F. M. Cornford, “The Harmony of the Spheres,” in F. M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 19. The Enneads, 3, 6, 2, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 6–7. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 11–12. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 13–14. Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 14; Cornish, “Angels;” Robert H. West, Milton and the Angels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955). Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 7.

Notes to pages 121–123

65. Ante-Nicene Church Fathers, 30 vols. (Edinburgh, 1869), vol. 2, The Miscellanies, Book 7, 434–435, in Carter, “Celestial Dance,” 8. 66. “There, they produce sweet commotions, which are against their nature imprisoned and endeavour as much as possible to escape and to reveal themselves. This act draws to the outside this sweetness and melody and expresses them through our dancing body. It proved itself to be united and in accord with the voice and the musical harmony, which arise from the harmonious and sweet song or the measured sound we are listening to.” Gvilielmi Hebraei Pistauriensis de practica sev arte tripvdii vvulgare opvscvlvm, in Berghaus, 56–57; see 68–69 nn. 37 and 47. The author uses a manuscript of 1463 produced by Pagano da Rho. 67. Berghaus, 57–58 (the quotations are his). 68. Le nozze di Costanza Sforza e Camilla d’Aragona celebrate a Pesaro nel Maggio 1475 Narrazione anonima (Florence, 1946), 45, in Berghaus, 60; 69–70 n. 50. In his “Dialogue on Dance” (Venice, 1550), Rinaldo Corso defended dancing by referring, among other things, to its links with Dante’s divine love, the movements of the cosmos in the Inferno, and its imperceptible sounds. Corso advocates dance as a means of uniting the other arts: “In the art of dancing all other arts are united. From painting to all other similar arts, they are all (contained) in it. For that reason, you can see the dancers imitating all other arts, when they arrange their movements in the many ways one can choose. Music, obviously forms part of dancing. Together, these arts establish the manners, which . . . do not allow any unseemly oddities in dance.” In ibid., 63. See ibid., 68 n. 55 for further scholarship on Renaissance dance. 69. Berghaus, 63–64. On Pythagoras and his reception through the Middle Ages, see Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2006); for the Renaissance, her Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On music, musicians, and the harmony of the spheres, see esp. ibid., 33–34; 102–103; 122–123. On the idea of the music of the spheres, in particular, see Berghaus, 66 n. 4; De Tolnay, op. cit.; Cornford, “The Harmony of the Spheres,” 14–27. 70. See Archangel Jibreel, detail from a fourteenth-century manuscript (Granger Collection, New York), in Charl Engela, Musical Symbolism in Early Renaissance Italian Painting (2005), n. 10 Fig. 4 (available at: http://www.philipresheph.com/ a424/projects/engela.pdf). 71. Quoted in Engela, 7. On Enoch, see Chapter 5. 72. In his sumptuous Maestà (Massa Marittima) (c. 1335), Ambrogio Lorenzetti also included attentive angel musicians at either side of the Virgin’s throne, playing vielles and lutes. Engela, 11, Fig. 7. 73. See Anne Walters Robertson, “Remembering the Annunciation in Medieval Polyphony,” Speculum 70/2 (Apr. 1995): 275–304; Laura Jacobus, “Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua,” Art Bulletin 81/1 (Mar. 1999): 93–107. 74. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. Gaston C. de Vere, vol. 4 (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1913), 156–157. 75. Barnaba da Modena, Coronation of the Virgin (tempera on poplar) (1374) (National Gallery of Art, London). 76. Gentile da Fabriano, Coronation of the Virgin with Angels (tempera on panel) (c. 1400–1410) (Brera, Milan). These eight angels may refer to the eight

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77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

Gregorian musical tones which Émile Mâle, among others, discussed in connection with late eleventh-century capitals at Cluny. De Tolnay, 93–94. Starr; Sher. Emanuel Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts in the 15th Century: A Critical Approach to Realism and Symbolism in Sacred Painting,” The Musical Quarterly 49/4 (Oct. 1963): 450–463; esp. 453–456. The author also tentatively identifies the clavicytherium, and notes that only the tromba marina sees to be missing from this depiction of the full range of contemporary instruments. See also Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des Mittlelalters (Bern: Francke, 1962), esp. 196–230; Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art: Studies in Musical Iconology, second ed. (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. 137–149; E. W. Bredt, Die Welt der Künstler, vol. 1, Die Madonna mit Musizierenden Engeln (Ravensburg: Otto Maier, 1913). Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 454–455. As the author points out, PseudoDionysius, Aquinas, and other Church Fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, reiterated not only the construct of the angel choirs, but also of God as composer or performer of the music of the universe. See also Jacobs, op. cit. Fra Angelico, Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven (tempera on wood) (c. 1423–1424) (National Gallery of Art, London). Engela, 28. Engela, 29. Engela, 29. Engela, 30–31; Figure 25. These architectonic forms can be compared to Lazzaro Bastiani’s (d. 1512) more precarious, hovering cloud-dishes in his Adoration of the Magi (The Frick Collection, New York) on which closely packed Seraphim and Cherubim stand and sing. Engela (31) speculates that Costa’s patron was likely a cultivated Ferrarese who was linked to San Domenico, Ferrara. The artist seems to have had a special affinity with music, as suggested by his Concert (National Gallery of Art, London). Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 457. He notes, too, not only a proliferation of trumpets but also of organetti, particularly in scenes of the Assumption and Coronation. Fra Angelico often erred in this direction. Paolo and Giovanni Veneziano were particularly adept at including angel orchestras in their compositions, and the type seems to have been particularly favored in Venice. See, for example, their Coronation of the Virgin (The Frick Collection, New York) in which sixteen angels, mainly musicians, gather around the Virgin and Christ’s throne. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 457–459. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 458. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 458. See, for example, Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe and San Zaccaria altarpieces; Carpaccio’s Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (1510); and Cima da Conegliano’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (1496–1499). Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 459. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 460. Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts,” 461.

Notes to pages 128–131

94. Curt Sachs, “Chromatic Trumpets in the Renaissance,” The Musical Quarterly 36/1 (Jan. 1950): 62–66. The author notes northern examples, such as Hans Memling’s astonishing Christ Salvator Mundi among Musical and Singing Angels (c. 1487–1490) (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp). In this work, which portrays archaic practices such as the voice classifications, the tromba marina, also known as the “angel’s trumpet,” is shown; this is a stringed instrument, played with a bow, which originated in northern Europe, and produced a “male” voice in nuns’ choirs. The shofar and ‘hassar of the Old Testament represent the instruments that sounded in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. 95. See Geiger, Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Chapel. 96. Geiger, 49. 97. Geiger, 51; 133–134. 98. Summa theologiae 3, 30, 4. Question 30: “Of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin;” article 4, “Whether the Annunciation Took Place in Becoming Order?,” in Geiger, 135. 99. Geiger, 134–135; 146 n. 5: Antoninus, Summa theologica [4 vols. (Verona, 1740)] 4, 15, 9, 3. 100. Geiger (132–148) discusses Lippi’s novel organization and iconography in his Annunciation, noting (139–141) the continuity of these devotional currents. On these themes in Dominican spirituality, see Hood, op. cit. 101. These are Geiger’s hypotheses and conclusions (138–146). 102. Summa theologica 4, 15, 22, in Geiger, 144; 148 n. 52. The author finds this symbolism reinforced by the objects painted in the alcove above the Virgin, including the open book which pairs with the open book with blank pages held up by a standing angel (Plate 71). Aquinas had written at length about the open book on which God inscribes the names of those destined for salvation. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 24, 1, in ibid., 144. 103. Summa theologiae, 2, 2, 172, in Geiger, 67. 104. Geiger, 57–58; 68; Plate 18. The author notes, as well, the Virgilian inscription that contemporaries would have interpreted as a prophecy of the advent of Christ. 105. Christian K. Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Geiger, 150–151. 106. Summa theologiae, 2, 2, 91, in Geiger, 152. 107. Geiger, 152; see 159 n. 23 for further bibliography; Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art: Studies in Musical Iconology, Chapter 13, “Muses and Music in a Burial Chapel: An Interpretation of Filippino Lippi’s Window Wall in the Cappella Strozzi,” 166–184; idem., “Instruments de musique estranges chez Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo et Lorenzo Costa,” Les fêtes de la Renaissance: Études réunies et présentées par Jean Jacquet, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherché scientifique, 1956-), 379–395. 108. Geiger, 152. 109. Geiger (152) sees in this action of the draperies a Florentine tradition begun by Nanni di Banco in his Assumption relief on the Porta della Mandorla of the Duomo and continued by Verrocchio, as in his Forteguerri monument of the 1470s. 110. Geiger, 155, citing Vasari’s life of Filippino. 111. Geiger, 155.

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112. See Geiger’s discussion (163), and analogies with Northern Italian examples. 113. Eight of the angels, in fragments, are housed in the Vatican’s Pinacoteca, along with four fragments of the Apostles, who look upwards. The fragment of Christ in Glory is housed at the Palazzo Quirinale. Overall, the fresco survives in fifteen pieces. In addition to these eight angels, two fragments show putti among the clouds. See B. Biagetti, “L’abside di Melozzo in Ss. Apostoli,” Rendiconti Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, 15 (1939/1940): 255–257; Armando Schiavo, “Melozzo a Roma,” Presenza Romagnola 2 (1977): 94–101; Nicholas Clark, Melozzo da Forlì: Pictor Papalis (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1990), 61–71; Isabelle Frank, “Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and Melozzo da Forlì at SS. Apostoli,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59/1 (1996): 97–122. 114. This is the persuasive argument of Frank, esp. 103–109. 115. See the old reconstruction of the apse composition by Bencivenga, reproduced in my “Antoniazzo Romano and the Recovery of Jerusalem in Late FifteenthCentury Rome,” Storia dell’Arte 83 (1995), 36, Fig. 8. 116. Mario di Giampaolo, “Un’aggiunta a Orazio Samacchini disegnatore,” Bollettino d’arte 69/27 (Sept.-Oct. 1984): 117–118. The painting is now in Saltram House, Plympton, Devon, while the preliminary drawing for the painting’s composition is in the Gabinetto dei Disegni, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa. 117. Cornford, “Harmony of the Spheres,” 27 (as Pythagoras). 118. Genesis 28: 12–14 (RSV). 119. Genesis, 28: 17–20 (RSV). 120. The Hebrew Bible contains the pseudepigraphic text known as the Ladder of Jacob. See also Moshe Idel, “The Ladder of Ascension: The Reverberations of a Medieval Motif in the Renaissance,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 2, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 83–93. 121. See also Hosea 12: 4–7: “He strove with the angel and prevailed,/ he wept and sought his favour./ He met God at Bethel,/ and there God spoke with him–/ the Lord the God of hosts, the Lord is his name . . .” The movement of the angels up and down Jacob’s ladder is invoked by Dante, as well, in his Paradiso (22, 70–72). 122. Oration (ed. Garin), 114. 123. See my entry, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494),” in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann (University of St. Andrews/Oxford University Press, 2013; http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/ after-augustine/). 124. See useful background to Pico and his reception history into modern times in Brian P. Copenhaver, “The Secret of Pico’s Oration: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002): 56–81. 125. See Gill, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” Idel (op. cit.) analyzes Pico’s reception of the Spanish Arabic philosopher, Ibn al-Sid al-Batalyawsi (1052–1127), as well as of Yohanan Alemanno’s reworking of al-Batalyawsi in his commentary on the Pentateuch. 126. Copenhaver, 58–59. 127. Oration, in Copenhaver, 59. His translations (which I follow) are from the Latin text in Oratio de hominis dignitate, ed. Eugenio Garin (Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1994). 128. Oration, in Copenhaver, 59.

Notes to pages 137–139

129. See the clear account of Bruno Cumbo, “Pico della Mirandola e la ‘Rinascita di Origene’,” in La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 56–69. 130. “Rationalibus est credere Origenem esse salvum, quam credere ipsum esse damnatum.” Conclusiones, in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 58 n. 79: “Haereses Origeni attributae impiae sunt et detestandae, et merito per Ecclesiam condemnatae,” in ibid., 60 n. 83. 131. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 19. 132. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 20. 133. Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 58; Albert Rabil Jr., Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist (University Press of America, 1993), 52 n. 44. 134. Aldus Manutius, in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 58–59 n. 80. 135. Rabil, 52 n. 44; Wind, “The Revival of Origen,” 412–24; Walker, “Origène en France au début du XVIe siècle,” 101–119. 136. Walker, 109–113. 137. Erasmus expressed these views in a letter to John Eck in 1518; given in Walker, 114. Nevertheless, he could be critical of Origen, whom he thought excessively influenced by Platonic philosophy; this was of a piece with Erasmus’s overall commitment to a flexible, inclusive, and historically nuanced theological outlook. 138. Oration, in Cumbo, La Città di vita di Matteo Palmieri, 62–64. 139. Copenhaver, 59–60: “But Pico, like Ficino, condenses this epoch of vast changes into a unity, a coherent ancient wisdom of Chaldean, Orphic, Hermetic, Pythagorean, Platonic, and other philosophies, a prisca theologia of Greek and barbarian doctrines to support the revelations of the Bible. Iamblichus, third of the Neoplatonist masters after Plotinus and Porphyry, shaped the last phase of this tradition. After Iamblichus, its last great pagan voice was Proclus, who laid the groundwork for its Christian culmination in the mystical and angelic theologies of Dionysius the Areopagite, the name given to a fifth or sixth century writer whom most Christians of Pico’s day thought to be a companion of St. Paul. . . . For pagan theurge and Christian mystic alike, the ultimate reward was a loss of self, absorption into the divine by becoming one (henosis) with God.” 140. Copenhaver, 60. 141. The “pure contemplator, unaware of the body, withdrawn to the sanctuary of the mind, . . . is neither earthly nor heavenly but more majestic, a divinity cloaked in human flesh.” Oration, in Copenhaver, 61. By means of these four grades, rising beyond earthly appetites to contemplation, this creature “who transforms, forges and fashions himself in the shape of all flesh” tries to surpass the flesh. 142. Copenhaver, 61. 143. Pico echoes here, perhaps, his hero, Augustine’s soaring meditations in his Confessions on the nature of heaven as he and Monica stood at their window at Ostia; see Chapter 2. 144. Oration, in Copenhaver, 61. Pico refers to the words of the prophet, Asaph: “You are all gods and sons of the Most High,” in stating that misunderstanding these words might insult God’s gift of free choice. As Copenhaver suggests, Pico may also have intended Psalm 82, in which God judges the sins of the angels: “God stood in the synagogue of the gods, In their midst to judge among them . . .

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But these gods know nothing nor do they understand, They walk in shadows . . . I have declared: you are all gods, And sons of the Most High, Yet you shall die as men die, And you shall fall as one of the princes.” 145. Copenhaver, 62. 146. Copenhaver, 62. 147. Copenhaver, 62. The author notes here that Pico refers not only to Genesis but also to shamayim, or “heavens” in Hebrew, which contain fire (esh) and water (mayim), such that the waters above which the “Cherubic minds” hover are located above the visible heavens and below the Seraphim’s fire. 148. Oration, in Copenhaver, 62. 149. Copenhaver, 62. 150. Oration, in Copenhaver, 63. 151. Copenhaver, 63. The author notes the origins of Pico’s graded steps of ascent in both Stoic debate about philosophy and Plato’s theories of the identity of the soul. “Although the basic idea is triadic – moral purification and mental illumination leading to theological perfection – the initial catharsis often comes in two phases, one to cleanse a lower level of the soul, closer to the body, the other to purify a higher level. The resulting process of four steps claimed an ancient pedigree, represented by the triangular amulet or tetractys of the Pythagoreans . . . ” Clement of Alexandria, for example, a Christian writer, made use of this combined pagan and Christian tradition. Ibid., 64. 152. Oration, in Copenhaver, 66. 153. Copenhaver, 66 (the quotations are from his analysis); “The Dionysian program is an esoteric, ascetic, theurgic, eirenic, and ecstatic mysticism, terms that apply also to Pico’s advocacy of the Cherubic life.” 154. Oration, in Copenhaver, 67. 155. Copenhaver, 67. 156. Copenhaver, 68–69 (whom I follow closely). 157. This is lucidly summarized by Copenhaver, 68–70. 158. Gikatilla, in Copenhaver, 69. 159. Gikatilla, in Copenhaver, 69. 160. Copenhaver, 70. 161. Copenhaver, 70. 162. Copenhaver, 70. 163. Copenhaver (whom I follow closely), 70. 164. Copenhaver, 70. 165. Oration, in Copenhaver, 71. 166. Copenhaver, 72. 167. Copenhaver, 72–74. 168. Oration, in Copenhaver, 74. 169. Copenhaver, 74–75. 170. Marshall and Walsham, 31. 171. In P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., Occult in Early Modern Europe: A History (Basingstoke, 1999), 145–146, quoted in Marshall and Walsham, 31–32. 172. Abulafia, in Copenhaver, 77; see also 75–80. 173. Copenhaver, 76–77.

Notes to pages 144–147

174. Conclusiones nongentae: Le novecento tesi dell’anno 1486, ed. Albano Biondi (Florence: Olschki, 1995), 128, in Copenhaver, 77; see my Chapter 5. 175. Oration, in Copenhaver, 77–78. 176. Conclusiones, in Copenhaver, 78 (and commentary). 177. Abulafia, in Copenhaver, 78. 178. Copenhaver (78) notes the Aristotelian thread. 179. Copenhaver, 78–79. 180. Copenhaver, 79. 181. Abulafia, in Copenhaver, 79. 182. Copenhaver, 79. 183. “R. Ishmael said: I asked Metatron and said to him: ‘Why art thou called by the name of thy Creator, by seventy names?’ . . . He answered: . . . ‘Because I am Enoch, the son of Jared. For when generations of the flood sinned and were confounded in their deeds, . . . then the Holy One . . . removed me from their midst to be a witness against them. . . . Hence the Holy One . . . lifted me up . . . [and] assigned me for a prince . . . among the ministering angels. . . . In that hour three of the ministering angels, ‘Uzza, ‘Azza and ‘Azzael came forth and brought charges against me. . . . [But] the Holy One . . . answered: . . . ‘I delight in this one more than in all of you, and hence he shall be a prince . . . over you in the high heavens . . . ‘When the Holy One . . . went out and went in . . . to the Garden of Eden then all . . . beheld the splendour of his Shekinah, and they were not injured until the time of Enosh who was the head of all idol worshippers. . . . And they erected the idols . . . and . . . brought down the sun, the moon, planets and constellations . . . to attend them . . . They would not have been able to bring them down but for ‘Uzza, ‘Azza and ‘Azziel who taught them sorceries.” 3 Enoch or the Hebrew Book of Enoch, ed. and trans. Hugo Odeberg (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973), 8–16 (Chaps. 4–5), in Copenhaver, 79–80. 184. Copenhaver, 80. 185. See the excellent summary of Trithemius’s life and works, as well as those of his Renaissance contemporaries, in Bruce Gordon, “The Renaissance Angel,” in Marshall and Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World, 41–63. 186. Marshall and Walsham, 32. 187. On Dee, see Wayne Schumaker, “John Dee’s conversations with angels,” in his Renaissance Curiosa (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992), 15–52; Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Marshall and Walsham, 32–34. 188. Marshall and Waltham, 32; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). After Napier, Goodwin Wharton (1653– 1704) also interviewed Uriel, Michael, and Gabriel. 189. J. Beyer, “A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context,” in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds., Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe (1400– 1800) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 166–182; esp. 173–174. 190. Oration, in Copenhaver, 80. As the author points out (80–81), Pico’s sense of secrecy, both in terms of his sources and in terms of the philosopher’s practice (as well as the fact that his Oration was never published even though he meant it to engender public debate), are in themselves important markers in defining the character of Renaissance philosophy. On Enoch and Metatron, see Chapter 5. 191. “The Annunciation of the Lord,” in The Golden Legend, vol. 1, 197.

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192. Jeryldene M. Wood, “Piero’s Legend of the True Cross and the Friars of San Francesco,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63. 193. Wood, 63. 194. Wood, 63; see 213 n. 50 for the full text. 195. Wood, 63. 196. Montefeltro Altarpiece (oil and tempera on panel) (248 × 170) (Pinacoteca del Brera, Milan); Baptism of Christ (egg tempera on poplar) (167 × 116 cm) (National Gallery of Art, London). J. V. Field proposes that Piero may have used the angels in his Baptism as the standard measure for the human figures. Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2005), 383. In the work by a follower of Piero’s, the Williamstown Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels (oil and tempera [?] on panel) (107.8 × 78.4 cm) (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), the angels are wingless, but they seem to perform the same function. On the other hand, the musical angels in his Nativity (oil on poplar) (1470–1475) (124 × 123 cm) (National Gallery of Art, London) seem to owe more, in their calligraphic delicacy, to Luca della Robbia’s Cantoria for the Duomo of Florence. Field, 255. 197. Tempera on panel (133 × 60 cm) (National Gallery of Art, London).

4. Contemplation: Angelic Witness and Empathy 1.

2.

3.

John Shearman “The ‘Dead Christ’ by Rosso Fiorentino,” Boston Museum Bulletin 64/338 (1966): 148–172; David Franklin, Rosso in Italy: The Italian Career of Rosso Fiorentino (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1994), 138–148; Regina Stefaniak, “Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso’s Dead Christ with Angels,” Renaissance Quarterly 45/4 (Winter 1992): 677–738. Pietà (c. 1537–1540) (Louvre). On Rosso’s indebtedness here to Michelangelo and to the antique, see also Shearman, “The ‘Dead Christ’,” 156–157. The figure of an unusually young St. Joseph, in Rosso’s Betrothal of the Virgin with SS. Anne, Apollonia, and Vincent Ferrer (1523) (San Lorenzo, Florence), also has similar curls, though much more loosely worked; this difference must be a function of scale. The similarities of Joseph’s youth and his curls may not be coincidental given Joseph’s special understanding with the angels, as we have seen. The curls appear again in the youth supporting Christ’s head in the Deposition from the Cross (1527–1528) (San Lorenzo, Sansepolcro), and in the muscular child at the left of the later Città di Castello Risen Christ in Glory with the Virgin, Three Saints, and the People of Città di Castello (Duomo, Città di Castello). That the artist associated such ornate curls with the antique is suggested by their appearance on Mars in his drawing of Mars and Venus (Louvre). Later still, at Fontainebleau, in his fresco of The Death of Adonis (Gallery of Francis I), he gave the hero’s companions massive wings, thus mingling secular and religious iconography with typical inventiveness. On the notion of Christ’s body as the “bread of angels,” see, for example, Tundale’s Vision (1149), in Chapter 2, n. 1. Stefaniak (702) goes further: “If the angels were sufficiently corporeal for them credibly to palpate his wound, then, since the metaphor was displaced here to its literal meaning, cannibalism threatened; indeed, the angels are disturbingly intent, attentive with an eagerness, a greediness more than erotic. Rosso then equivocated concerning the bodies of the angels, whose heads are more plastically developed than their

Notes to pages 153–156

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

torsos, whose upper parts appear more substantial than their lower. . . . But again, the qualification of their physical presence compromised their capacity for empirical investigation and even their status as witnesses to Christ’s presence. In Rosso’s panel the level of knowledge seemed to exclude the level of sense; the level of sense devolved frighteningly downwards.” See also John Freccero, “Bestial Sign and Bread of Angels (Inferno 32–33),” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 53–66; reprinted in Dante: Poetics of Conversion, 163–166. To cite only a few examples, Domenico Beccafumi painted a Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels on his double-sided panel for the Compagnia di Sant’Antonio Abate in 1538–1540; for the Sienese Compagnia di Santa Maria in Portico a Fontegiusta, Giorgio di Giovanni painted a Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (1538–1559) (both in the Pinacoteca, Siena). Marco Palmezzano depicted a Pietà with Two Angels probably at about the same time (Ca’ d’Oro, Venice). The angels at either side have different kinds of roles, but the body of Christ in each case seems to possess some independence and incipient life. In addition to Stefaniak and Shearman, see Sydney Freedberg, Painting in Italy: 1500–1600 (Harmondsworth/New York: Penguin, 1979), 201–203. Franklin (146) offers a particularly sensitive reading of the angels. Stefaniak argued for this context. See also Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 5, “Passionate Withdrawal,” 143–168. Franklin (Rosso in Italy, 138–141) thinks that it may have been intended for a more public context. In any case, before the Sack of Rome in 1527, the panel was in Rosso’s possession, and he seems to have left it (covered with a waxed, linen curtain) in the custody of the Poor Clares of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, Rome. On Luther and the angels, see Chapter 5. Sermon von den Engeln, in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar, 1881), Schriften, vol. 3, 113. The sermon was printed five times in Wittenberg in the following year, and reissued in 1535; it circulated in the Latin editions of the sermons and in manuscript form. Philip M. Soergel, “Luther on the Angels,” in Marshall and Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World, 73–74. Soergel, 79–80. Stefaniak, 679–693. De erroribus contigentibus in eucharistiae sacramento (1525), 52 (published in Venice in 1531 as Instructio nuntii circa errores libelli de cena domini). Stefaniak, 681–682. Op. cit., in Stefaniak, 682. Stefaniak, 682 (on the noncorporeal presence of Christ). Stefaniak, 683 (“alternative noncorporeal bodies”). Summa theologiae 3, 76, 8, in Stefaniak, 683. Summa theologiae 3, 83, 1, in Stefaniak, 683; “As a picture represents that of which it is the image, and as the image is called by the name of that which it signifies, as an image of Achilles is called Achilles, so the sacrifice of the Mass is called by the name of the true sacrifice once acted out.” Peter of Poitiers (d. 1204), In sententiarum 5,14, in Stefaniak, 683. See Stefaniak, esp. 683–693. De sacrificio missae, in Stefaniak, 687–688. Stefaniak, 714.

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Notes to pages 156–161

20. This subject would be taken up again at San Marco in 1536 by Giovanni Antonio Sogliano in his fresco for the refectory (now museum) of St. Dominic and his Friars Fed by Angels. 21. This is very much the argument of Stefaniak and Nagel, op. cit. 22. Stefaniak, 719; Göttler, 31–70. 23. See Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 145. 24. On the Engelpietà, see Georg Swarzenski, “Insinuationes divinae pietatis,” in Festschrift Heinrich Wölfflin (Munich: Schmid, 1924), 65–74; Hubert Schrade, “Beitrag zur Erklärung des Schmerzensmannbildes,” Deutschkundliches – Friedrich Panzer zum 60. Geburtstag überreicht (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930), 178– 179; Gert von der Osten, “Engelpietà,” in Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Druckenmüller, 1960), 603. This distinction, derived from Erwin Panofsky (“‘Imago Pietatis.’ Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des ‘Schmerzensmanns’ und der ‘Maria Mediatrix,’” in Festchrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage [Leipzig: Seeman, 1927], 261–308), is noted by Nagel, 262–263 n. 28. Andrea del Sarto combined the type in his lost Puccini Pietà, as Nagel also notes, following John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 229–230. Shearman suggested in his article that the Sarto work was a source for Rosso. 25. See Nagel’s discussion of this drawing in Chapter 6, “Artwork and Cult Image,” 169–187. 26. In Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, 1979), 423–428. See Nagel, op. cit., 180–185; also his “Observations on Michelangelo’s late Pietà drawings and sculptures,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996): 548–572; “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin 79/4 (Dec. 1997): 647–668. 27. Colonna, Pianto, 425, in Nagel, 181. 28. Colonna, Pianto, 427, in Nagel, 182. 29. Colonna, Pianto, 427, in Nagel, 182. 30. The image refers to Psalm 118, 37: “Turn away my eyes that they may not behold vanity.” See Göttler, 26, Fig. 6; 5–7; 25. 31. To cite only one example: The Rational or Blessed Soul, in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603). The soul is veiled as well aswinged. Ripa mentions Augustine’s De anima in explicating that embodied and disembodied souls are “pure incorporeal” and “immortal substances,” to be compared with the substances of God and angels. The veil means that the rational soul is “invisible to corporeal eyes and that the soul is the substantial form of the body.” Although not seen by us, spirits should be portrayed “in that best way that a human being dependent on the corporeal senses can understand [them] by means of the imagination.” Iconologia overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’antichità, & di propria invenzione (Rome, 1603). In Göttler, 225–226, Fig. 99. 32. In Göttler, 251, Fig. 109. 33. This was first formally observed by Frederick Hartt in 1961; see now Philippe Costamagna, “La création de l’ordre des Théatins et ses repercussions sur l’art de Rosso Fiorentino et de ses contemporains,” in Pontormo e Rosso: La ‘Maniera Moderna’ in Toscana 1494–1994 (Atti del convegno di Empoli e Volterra: Progetto Appiani di Piombino), eds. Roberto P. Ciardi and Antonio Natali (Venice: Regione Toscana/Marsilio, 1996), 157–163.

Notes to pages 162–167

34. Costamagna, 157–158. The author reprises the outlines and mentality of this reform movement beginning with Savonarola, then through the Lateran Council (1512–1517) and beyond. 35. David Franklin, “Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo V Appiani: Art in Piombino in the First Part of the Sixteenth Century,” in Pontormo e Rosso, 281; esp. his Rosso in Italy, 140ff; 309; Eugene A. Carroll, “On Rosso’s Volterra Deposition and Other Tragedies,” in Pontormo e Rosso, 117. 36. “figura domini nostra Iesu Christi in forma Pietatis, cum quibusdam angelis circumcircha dictam figuram,” in Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 139–140; 144. 37. Vasari, “Life of Pontormo,” Le Vite, vol. 6 (Milanesi) (1878–1885), 247, in Franklin, “Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo V Appiani,” 281. 38. John Kent Lydecker, “The Patron, Date, and Original Location of Andrea del Sarto’s Tobias Altarpiece,” The Burlington Magazine 127/987 (June, 1985): 349–353. 39. Sarto’s work (though not the angels) is discussed in Franklin, “Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo V Appiani,” 292; 284; 292 n. 9; his Rosso in Italy, 64; 277 n. 44; Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, vol. 2 (1965), 229. 40. Shearman, “The ‘Dead Christ’ by Rosso Fiorentino,” 152–153. 41. As Franklin observes (“Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo V Appiani,” 282), the engraving and painting are oriented in the same direction. 42. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 18–29. 43. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 26–27. The author notes Vasari’s Assumption (Sant’Agostino, Monte San Savino) and Coronation (San Francesco, Città di Castello). 44. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 35–53. 45. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 35–53. 46. “Fecegli far lo spedalingo di Santa Maria Nuova una tavola, la quale vedendola abbozzata, gli parvero, come colui ch’era poco intendente di quest’arte, tutti quei Santi, diavoli; avendo il Rosso costume nelle sue bozze a olio di fare certe arie crudeli e disperate, e nel finirle poi addolciva l’aria e riducevale al buono. Per che se gli fuggi di casa, e non volle la tavola, dicendo che lo aveva giuntato.” vol. 5 (1568), in Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 275 n. 38. 47. Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 50–51; 275 n. 62; Antonio Natali, “Marginalia per due opere del Rosso agli Uffizi,” Antichità viva 24/1–3 (1985), 41–43, Figs. 1–3. Franklin (51) originally dated the fragment on the basis of style to later than the Santa Maria Nuova panel, possibly to 1519–1520 or as late as 1523–1524; he revised this to 1521 on the basis of conservation evidence. Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500–1550 (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2001), 178. Natali provided important evidence, derived from reflectography, for the presence of other figures in a larger work of which this is a fragment. 48. The image of the lutenist angel soloist is not unique to Rosso. He appears, for example, in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s Holy Family with St. Paul (engraving; 153 × 187 mm.) (Bartsch 7, 5); Girolamo Romanino, Madonna Enthroned with Saints (Berlin); see Bredt, Figs. 11 and 16. I am greatly indebted here and in what follows to Victor A. Coelho for his identification not only of Rosso’s angel’s action but also for his precise and comprehensive analysis of the instrument in Rosso’s painting. 49. Dr. Coelho alerted me to the example of a six-coursed instrument, the Venere Vendello lute in the collections of the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali, Rome (Inv. 706). This lute was made in Padua in 1587. See

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50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

Luisa Cervelli, La Galleria Armonica: Catalago del Museo degli Strumenti Musicali di Roma (Rome, 1994), 250. Dr. Coelho further speculates that the angel might be sounding a G (should the lute be tuned in G). Rosso’s lute matches another representation from the circle of Raphael (c. 1503), in which a kneeling musician holds a lute with twelve pegs. Here, he is correctly holding the lute. The drawing (Biblioteca Reale di Torino, Inv. N. 15736 D. C.) has been assigned to Perugino as well as Raphael. See Da Leonardo a Rembrandt: Disegni della Biblioteca Reale di Torino, ed. Gianni Carlo Sciolla (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1990), 80–81. I am grateful to Dr. Coelho for this reference. Dr. Coelho speculated about this and similar interpretations. The red hair of the angel is also interesting and may be another example of an autobiographical, pictorial pun on the part of Rosso. See Paul Barolsky, “Rosso’s Red Hair,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 16/2 (Winter 1997): 33–36. On this painting and its relation to Sarto’s Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels (Louvre), see Franklin, Rosso in Italy, 76–80. Annunciation (panel) (185 × 174.5 cm) (Florence, Palazzo Pitti); see Franklin, 4–6. Tobias Altarpiece (oil on panel) (153 × 178 cm) (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); Lydecker, op. cit.; Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, vol. 1, 16; vol. 2, No. 20, 205–207. As Lydecker (and Shearman) note, Leonardo appears at the right in Sarto’s fresco from the life of St. Filippo Benizzi (1510) in SS. Annunziata. See also Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur et al., Szenen aus dem Buch Tobias: Aus der Tapisseriensammlung des Kunsthistorischen Museums (Vienna/Milan: Kunsthistorisches Museum/Skira, 2004), 114–115. Lydecker, 351–352. Leonardo also paid for work at the church’s altar of the Annunciation. Elizabeth Philpot, Old Testament Apocryphal Images in European Art (Göteborg: University of Gothenburg/Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2009), 130. “Tobit,” in The Apocrypha: The Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books of the Old Testament (New Revised Standard Version) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992/2005), 1–13. Raphael is counted among the seven angels of Revelation, though he is not identified by name. He identifies himself as one of seven angels (see below). In the Kabbalah, he is one of the ten Sephirot of the Tree of Life, and he is believed to be one of the three angels who visited with Abraham. As a healer, he eased Abraham’s pain at circumcision, as well as Jacob’s injured thigh, following his round with the angel. Preface to the Book of Tobit (1534), in Word and Sacrament, 1, in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, ed. E. T. Bachmann (Philadelphia, 1969), 345–347, in Philpot, 129; 166: “If the events really happened, then it is a fine and holy history. But if they are all made up, then it is indeed a very beautiful, wholesome, and useful fiction or drama by a gifted poet. . . . Therefore this book is useful and good for us Christians to read. It is the work of a fine Hebrew author who deals with trivial but important issues, and whose witty concerns are extraordinarily Christian.” The Book of Tobit was originally written in Chaldean, an Aramaic language, and, like other books of the Apocrypha, it was translated into Greek in three variants. These were the basis for the Book until the discovery, in 1952, of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Cave IV at Qumran, when pieces were found in Aramaic and Hebrew. Philpot, 129; for a detailed analysis of the three texts, see Robert Hanhart, Text und Textgeschichte des Buches Tobit (Göttingen:

Notes to pages 172–176

61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984); Merten Rabenau, Studien zum Buch Tobit (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994). See Chapter 3. Howard Schwartz, Gabriel’s Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Quoted in Konrad Eisenbichler, “Devotion to the Archangel Raphael in Renaissance Florence,” in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), 251. John J. Contreni, “‘Building Mansions in Heaven’: The Visio Baronti, Archangel Raphael, and a Carolingian King,” Speculum 78/3 (July 2003): 673–706. The author gives a clear account of this “best-seller’s” history and contents, noting Raphael’s previously overlooked prominence. Contreni, 675–676. In Book 4 of his Dialogues, Gregory took care to define types of visions, as opposed to revelation, following his record of three monks who had night visions of approaching death. Peter, who was Gregory’s interlocutor, inquired as to whether night visions should be taken seriously. Gregory itemized “images of sleep,” linking them to six causes: “a full stomach; an empty stomach; an illusion; a thought and an illusion; a revelation; a thought and a revelation.” These he arranged in a hierarchy that ascended. Revelations, such as Daniel had of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, are seen by the “incorporeal eye of the mind” (676–677). In this light, Barontus’s vision was a revelation. Contreni, 678. “Rafahel, qui interpraetatur Dei medicina,” in Contreni, 678 n. 19; this meaning is derived from Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels (34, 9, 222–334), as the author points out. Gregory also links Raphael with Tobias (691 n. 70). Contreni, 680–681. Contreni, 691. Keck, 51. In the Vulgate, Tobit was identified by name also as Tobias; see also Johann Gamberoni, Die Auslegung des Buches Tobias in der griechisch-lateinischen Kirche der Antike und der Christenheit des Westens bis zum 1600 (Munich: Kösel, 1969). Contreni, 692. In the ninth-century version of another vision narrative, the Visio Sancti Pauli, Raphael supplanted St. Michael in his usual role as Paul’s companion. As the author speculates (696), this may be evidence of the influence of the Visio Baronti. Ambrose, De Tobia, ed. Lois Miles Zucker (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1933). Epistola ad Africanum 12 (Bibliotheke Hellenon Pateron, vol. 16, 359f.), in Patrick Henry Reardon, “The Wide World of Tobit: The Apocrypha’s Tobit & Literary Tradition,” Touchstone 12/2 (March/April, 1999); Paul Deselaers, Das Buch Tobit (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1990), 7. “Tunc praecucurrit canis, qui simul fuerat in via, et quasi nuntius adveniens blandimento suae caudae gaudebat” (Then the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before, and coming as if it had brought the news, showed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail). Book of Tobit, 11, 9, rephrasing The Odyssey, 17, 302; Jerome, Praefatio in Librum Tobiae (PL 29, 26A). Reardon, op. cit. Venerable Bede, Interpretatio in Librum Tobiae (PL 91.923–938). Cf. the analysis of Bede’s exegesis of Tobit by Gamberoni, 107–123. Walafrid Strabo, Glossa Ordinaria (PL 113.725–732); Hugh of Saint-Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 9, 2 (PL 175.737–744); Isaac of Stella, Sermones

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77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

7, 11–14 (PL 194.1715). For other examples, see Gamberoni, 124–146; Reardon, op. cit. Cyprian, De Mortalitate 10 (PL 4, 588); Augustine, De Divinis Scripturis 28; Hugh of Saint-Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 9, 2 (PL 175, 737–744). For these and others, see Reardon, op. cit. “I speak as one must to minds like yours/ which apprehend only from sense perception/ what later it makes fit for intellection. For this same reason Scripture condescends/ to your intelligence, attributing/ with other meaning, hands and feet to God; And Holy Church presents to you archangels/ with human features: Gabriel and Michael/ and that one who made Tobit see again.” On Renaissance interpretations, see Gertrude M. Achenbach, “The Iconography of Tobias and the Angel in Florentine Painting of the Renaissance,” Marsyas 3 (1943–1945): 71–86; Trevor Hart, “Tobit in the Art of the Florentine Renaissance,” in Studies in the Book of Tobit: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Mark Bredin (London/New York: T. & T. Clark, 2006), 72–89. The present church of Angelo Raffaele, in Venice’s Dorsoduro neighborhood, was begun in 1618 by Francesco Contin, but it was built on the site of a building dating back perhaps as far as the seventh or even fifth centuries. This foundation was dedicated to Raphael by the late twelfth century. Among the Tobias subjects are the sculpture of him with the angel by Sebastiano Mariani da Lugano (d. 1518) above the entrance portal, and the six paintings decorating the organ loft by Giovanni Antonio Guardi (c. 1750). Francesco Fontebasso (1707–1769) executed a fresco of St. Michael casting out Lucifer in the vault of the nave. Venice’s Lutheran community took possession of the scuola building in Cannaregio only in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the long-standing commitment to reform ideals among Venice’s educated classes before Luther, and given momentum with the inauguration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in 1508, should be noted. The Venetian, Gasparo Contarini (1481–1542), had already promulgated notions sympathetic to Luther’s regarding faith and works in 1511, as had the excommunicated Augustinian, Andrea da Ferrara, whose preaching in Campo Santo Stefano drew huge crowds. The Scuola commissioned their own building in 1713, from which period dates Heinrich Meyring’s (Enrico Merengo’s) sculpture of Tobias and Raphael; until then, the confraternity had met in nearby SS. Apostoli. Sebastiano Ricci painted the altarpiece of The Guardian Angel in 1730, and a portrait of Luther attributed to the Cranach workshop also decorates the interior. Luther speculated that the Greeks borrowed from the Jews in this respect; cf. Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 345. Reardon also notes connections with Sophocles’ Antigone. Tempera on panel (49.5 × 31.3 cm) (Yale University Art Gallery); see also the same artist’s two panels, likely for a predella, in Vienna (c. 1435–1440) (both 22 × 51 cm). Schmitz-von Ledebur et al., 108–113. See the analysis and entry for “Guardian Angel” of Alonso de Villegas Selvago, Flos sanctorum (c. 1570–1580), quoted at length in Eisenbichler, “Devotion to the Archangel Raphael,” 253–254. Umberto Utro, “Temi biblici nelle collezione di medaglioni vitrei con figure in oro del Museo Cristiano,” Bollettino – Monumenti, musei e gallerie pontificie 20 (2000): 53–84.

Notes to pages 178–181

84. Philpot, 142–148. Both the medieval Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis showed scenes from Tobit within a typological setting, with the union of Tobias and Sarah represented as a prefiguration of the marriage of the Virgin. 85. This subject is derived from the Eastern apocryphal legend of Zacharias in which Elizabeth flees to the desert to spare her son from the massacre of the innocents. Achenbach, 73. 86. Utro, 74. 87. Another example is Giovanni di Piamonte’s (attr.) Archangel Raphael and Tobias (1467–1468) (San Giovanni Valdarno, Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie). See Gabriella di Cagno, “Due famiglie e un dipinto: un committente per L’Arcangelo Raffaele e Tobiolo nel Museo di San Giovanni Valdarno,” Studi di Storia dell’Arte 9 (1998): 299–304. Although the author does not make this point, given the pair of family stemme on the panel (flanking an inscription testifying to Raphael’s healing powers), and signifying union by marriage, this subject is especially appropriate and auspicious given Raphael’s role as a matchmaker. The author proposes that the commission may have coincided with the position of podestà attained by Soldo di Antonio di Andrea del Soldato in 1467. He married into the Serragli family. See also Janos Eisler, “Dans l’atelier de Verrocchio,” Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 82 (1995): 51–67; 143–150. 88. This more materialistic implication is especially relevant in the case of the sumptuous mid-sixteenth-century tapestry series made in Brussels within the circle of Barent van Orley (now in Vienna). Apart from their luxurious medium, the tapestries are bursting with anecdotal detail, such as elaborate furnishings and household goods. See Schmitz-von Ledebur et al. 89. David Alan Brown, Leonardo apprendista (XXXIX Lettura Vinciana) (17 April 1999) (Città di Vinci: Biblioteca Leonardiana, 2000), 14; cf. Ernst Gombrich, “Tobias and the Angel,” in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972/1985/1993), 26–30. 90. Giuliano Bugiardini, Scenes from the Story of Tobias (poplar) (c. 1500) (60 × 159 cm) (Staatliche Museen, Berlin). 91. Master of Pratovecchio, The Three Archangels (tempera and gold on wood) (c. 1450) (39 × 27 cm) (Staatliche Museen, Berlin). 92. In 1462, Neri di Bicci painted this subject for Fra Francesco Mellini; his work was destroyed by fire in 1471. He painted it again for the merchant, Mariotto Marco della Palla (Detroit Institute of Arts). On these commissions and the decorative history of Santo Spirito in the fifteenth century, see Antonia Fondaras, Decorating the House of Wisdom: Four Altarpieces from the Church of Santo Spirito in Florence (1485–1490) (Ph.D. dissertation) (University of Maryland, College Park, 2011). 93. Three Archangels with Tobias (tempera on panel) (c. 1470) (135 × 154 cm) (Uffizi). 94. Tobias and the Angel (egg tempera on poplar) (84 × 66 cm) (National Gallery of Art, London); see my Introduction. If we accept David Brown’s attribution and redating of the Baptism of Christ to the mid-1470s, then this work would date to the earlier period of Leonardo’s apprenticeship. See his Leonardo apprendista, esp. 14–19. 95. Brown, 15–16. 96. Filippo Lippi, Madonna della Cintola (tempera on wood) (1455–1465) (191 × 187 cm) (Museo Civico, Prato); Sandro Botticelli, Pala delle Convertite (Holy Trinity) (tempera on panel) (1493–1495) (215 × 192 cm) (Courtauld

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Institute Galleries, London); Francesco Botticini, Madonna and Child Between St. Francis and the Archangel Raphael and Tobias (panel) (c. 1495) (149 × 170 cm) (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). 97. Lisa Venturini, Francesco Botticini (Florence: Edifir, 1994), 108; Achenbach, 77; both cited in Cäcilia Bischoff, “Zur Tobias-Ikonographie in der Malerei des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Schmitz-von Ledebur et al., 106. 98. Fondaras, op. cit. 99. Benozzo Gozzoli inserted a charming vignette into his larger fresco cycle dedicated to the life of St. Augustine (Sant’Agostino, San Gimignano). He depicted the fish swimming toward Tobias’s foot as Raphael warns him. The pair appears again on a fictive pier. 100. Lightbown, 205–206. 101. Tobias and the Angel (panel) (1460) (Galleria Sabauda, Turin). This is true, of course, in many other examples, such as Altobello Melone’s panel (112 × 48 cm) (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) and Pietro Perugino’s Certosa Polyptych (oil with tempera on wood) (c. 1496–1500) (National Gallery of Art, London). Here, the Virgin and Child with an angel are flanked by panels of St. Michael (left) and Tobias and Raphael (right). On Altobello’s panel, see Norman Land, “Reconstructing a Reconstruction; Altobello Melone’s Picenardi Altarpiece,” Muse: Annual of the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri– Columbia 31–32 (1997–1998): 9–23. The author notes the Christological significance of the composition of the work since the Christ Child in the central panel looks toward Tobias and his fish at his left, and Tobias reciprocates his gaze. In the predella below, themes of blindness and insight are further reinforced by the artist’s choice of episodes from the legend of the True Cross. 102. Hart, op. cit. 103. Oil on panel; transferred to canvas (Abbey of Santa Maria della Misericordia, Venice; Accademia, Venice); Adolfo Bernardello, “Le peripezie di un dipinto di Cima da Conegliano (1827–1839)”, in Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere ed Arti), 155 (1996–1997): 287–299. 104. (oil on canvas) (1522–1525) (96 × 124 cm) (Galleria Borghese, Rome); on the unusual iconography, see Chiara Parisio, “Ipotesi sul Savoldo,” Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia, Atti della Fondazione “Ugo da Como,” 1989 (Brescia: Geroldi, 1990), 443–451. The author notes Savoldo’s unusual choice of narrative moment, connecting it to Flemish tradition, as well as to a work by Moretto and Titian’s Averoldi Polyptych in Brescia (1522), among others. See, in particular, the classic study by Julius S. Held, “Rembrandt and the Book of Tobit,” in Rembrandt’s Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 104–129. Held’s theory, though, that the number of Quattrocento works was probably due to their function as ex-votos for the “safe return of traveling children” might be expanded to include other purposes. 105. Bischoff, 105; Schmitz-von Ledebur et al., 117–118. 106. Schmitz-von Ledebur et al., 117–118. 107. Walter Pater hinted at Raphael as an image of mystic inspiration in his essay on Pico: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London/New York: Macmillan, 1888), 39; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 108. Konrad Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 30.

Notes to pages 186–191

109. Eisenbichler; Edmond Strainchamps, “Marco da Gagliano and the Compagnia dell’Arcangelo Raffaello in Florence: An Unknown Episode in the Composer’s Life,” in Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, eds. Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus (Florence: La Nuova Editrice, 1978), 473–488. 110. Eisenbichler (citing Christiane Klapisch-Zuber), 3. 111. Eisenbichler, Appendices 1–3. 112. Eisenbichler, Appendices 4–5. 113. Eisenbichler, 235–269. 114. On 24 December 1581, they sang the lauda, “Levate su pastori.” On 31 December 1610, a choir of angels flying above the Nativity (a capanna) sang a lauda. Eisenbichler, 237; 401 n. 4. 115. Robert L. Mode, “Adolescent Confratelli and the Cantoria of Luca della Robbia,” Art Bulletin 68/1 (1987): 67–71; Eisenbichler, 236–237. 116. As pointed out by Eisenbichler, 237. 117. Eisenbichler, 242–243. 118. According to the description of this lost work, the angels’ instruments included flutes, viols, organs, harpsichords, harps (or citharas), clavichords, sistra (a sort of rattle), and pan-pipes. 119. The panel (dated to before 1583) was inscribed: “Venite haec est Domus Dei, et Scala Coelj.” Eisenbichler, 338–339; 257–269. 120. The central panel of the Madonna and Child is now in the Yale University Art Gallery; the side panels are in the Church of the Advent, Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Eisenbichler, 343–344; “Devotion to the Archangel Raphael,” 261 n. 19. 121. Eisenbichler, 258–260. Many records are lacking for the period before the mid-sixteenth century. 122. Eisenbichler, Appendix 4. 123. Eisenbichler, 150–155. 124. Eisenbichler, 150–152. 125. Eisenbichler, 163–166. 126. Eisenbichler (172–173) suggests that these differences, in evidence for the seventeenth century, relate to the post-Tridentine emphasis on Eucharistic devotion. 127. Eisenbichler, 176–178. 128. Eisenbichler, 178. 129. Eisenbichler, 168; 171. 130. Eisenbichler, 168–169. 131. Liber de temporibus, in Eisenbichler, 169; 202. 132. In Eisenbichler, 172. 133. Eisenbichler, 200–204. 134. Eisenbichler, 204–214. 135. Eisenbichler, 205–206. 136. Eisenbichler, 207–214. 137. “It was all dedicated to the honour of God and to the glory of our great patron and father, the Archangel Raphael, and not for any other purpose or for human consideration, [but] begging him to receive the affection of our hearts and be our guide and most secure escort so that after the pilgrimage of this life [we may] arrive at the eternal homeland.” Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Compagnie religiose soppresse da Pietro Leopoldo, 162.22/23, in Eisenbichler, 209–210. 138. Eisenbichler, 49–53.

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Notes to pages 191–197

139. Eisenbichler, 51–52. 140. Eisenbichler, 147–148. 141. Oil on canvas, transferred from panel (215 × 158 cm) (Museo del Prado, Madrid). 142. John Shearman, “Raphael’s Clouds, and Correggio’s”; most recently, Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael; also, especially, his “At the Boundaries of Sight: The Italian Renaissance Cloud Putto,” in Renaissance Theories of Vision, eds. John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman (Surrey, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 117–133. 143. (oil on panel) (1518–1520) (405 × 278 cm) (Pinacoteca, Vatican). 144. Catherine King, “The Liturgical and Commemorative Allusions in Raphael’s Transfiguration and Failure to Heal,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 148–159. 145. See Christian Kleinbub, “Raphael’s Transfiguration as Visio-Devotional Program,” Art Bulletin 90/3 (2008): 367–393. 146. Kleinbub, “Raphael’s Transfiguration,” 372–373. 147. Susanne Schröer-Trambowsky, “‘Refa’el-Heil von Gott’: Das Vermächtnis von Raphaels Transfiguration: Heilungswirkung durch Malerei,” in Festschrift für Konrad Oberhuber, eds. Achim Gnann and Heinz Widauer (Milan: Electa, 2000), 43–55; esp. 53. Kathleen Weil-Garris Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art: 1515–1550 (New York, 1974), 45–47; Rudolf Preimesberger, “Tragische Motive in Raffaels ‘Transfiguration’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50 (1987): 88–115; esp. 95 n. 44. On “Christus Medicus,” see Rudolf Arbesmann, “The Concept of ‘Christus medicus’ in St. Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954): 1–28. 148. “De Raphael pictore/ Quid mirum si qua Christus tu luce peristi?/ Naturae ille Deus, tu Deus artis eras.” In John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602) (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003), 661–662. 149. Schröer-Trambowsky. In addition to the patristic writings mentioned above, see Nicolas de Lyra’s Biblia sacra cum glossa ordinaria, vol. 2 (Venice, 1603), col. 1514: “Raphael medicina Dei missus est;” col. 1542: “et sic angeluys iste vocatur Raphael, id est, medicus vel medicina Dei: quia missus fuit ad sanandum Tobiam.” Quoted in Eisenbichler, “Devotion to the Archangel Raphael,” 251 n. 1. 150. Weil-Garris Posner, 185 n. 31. 151. King argues persuasively for the choice of subject according to the Lenten calendar and Giulio’s promotion. She also points out Giulio’s piety, and his unusual dedication to prayer and almsgiving. 152. Preimesberger (95) suggests this with respect to the Medici. 153. Vienna, Albertina; Preimesberger, 91, Fig. 2; 91–92. These themes were even more in evidence in Sebastiano del Piombo’s “companion” piece of the Healing of Lazarus, which was commissioned after Raphael’s painting and finished before his. 154. On these themes, in general, see the important essay by Michael Cole, “The Demonic Arts and the Origins of the Medium,” Art Bulletin 84/4 (2002): 621–640. 155. For pointing out the remote possibility that this detail might be a fish, which is otherwise not pertinent to the narrative, I am grateful to Eric Denker. 156. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, First Part, “Treatise on the Angels,” (Questions 50–64), available at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa. FP_Q50_A2.html. See esp. Kleinbub, “At the Boundaries of Sight,” 120–121.

Notes to pages 197–205

157. Kleinbub, “At the Boundaries of Sight,” 125. The author also notes the similarities between Fra Bartolomeo’s cloud putti in his God the Father with SS. Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Siena (1509) and those of Titian in his Assumption (1516–1518), even though Fra Bartolomeo’s painting was not ultimately installed in Venice. The Florentine was in Venice in 1508 for this commission from the Dominican foundation of San Pietro Martire on Murano (panel; transferred; 361 × 236 cm; Museo e Pinacoteca Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, Lucca). Both he and Raphael, at about the same time, seem to have formulated the gold-cloud putto, though Fra Bartolomeo’s are less fully embodied. 158. Kleinbub, “At the Boundaries of Sight,” 127. 159. (356 × 270 cm) (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence); cf. his version in the Louvre (panel) (1511) (257 × 228 cm). Fra Bartolomeo’s Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen and John the Baptist also features a single lute-playing angel at the front and center. 160. See Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence 1500–1550, 86–90. 161. In her sensitive account of this fresco, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier sees Raphael following Dante in his stippling, as well as the poet’s account of the angels as living, golden sparks (Paradiso, 30). Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70–75. 162. See Kleinbub’s discussion (“At the Boundaries of Sight,” 128) of what he calls the cloud putti in these two works. 163. Shearman, “Raphael’s Clouds, and Correggio’s,” 666–668. 164. Shearman, “Raphael’s Clouds and Correggio’s,” 667. Assumption of the Virgin (fresco) (1093 × 1195 cm), Duomo, Parma.

5 Clouds and the Fall: Rebellion, Salvation, and Reform 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

“Denn das Schöne ist nichts/als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,/und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,/uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.” Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy, Duino Elegies (1923), in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 330–331. Vite, ed. G. Milanesi, 7; Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 29; my Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 200–207. Vasari noted, in his second edition of 1568, that Michelangelo had produced a number of sketches and designs of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, one of which was realized in the church by a Sicilian painter who had worked for Michelangelo for many months as a grinder of colors. It is likely that Bronzino also made a copy of them in his drawing of the Fall of the Rebel Angels. See Edgar Wind, “In the Beginning,” in The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo. The Sistine Ceiling, ed. Elizabeth Sears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 77. La vita, quoted in Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” 91. Barnes (48–49) points out that the Lenten season, from Ash Wednesday to Trinity Sunday, was especially important to the liturgical calendar of the chapel. Marcia B. Hall, Michelangelo. The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 161; 228–231.

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Notes to pages 205–209

8. Charles Burroughs, “The ‘Last Judgment’ of Michelangelo: Pictorial Space, Sacred Topography, and the Social World,” Artibus et historiae 16/32 (1995): 55–89. 9. In Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” 89–91. 10. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 205; City of God 9, 8, 1–4; 18, 18, 12–22; 11, 33, 1–2; 16, 24, 60; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. A Biography (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967/1969/2000), 311; see the classic study by Edward Langton, Essentials of Demonology: A Study of Jewish and Christian Doctrine, Its Origin and Development (London: The Epworth Press, 1949). 11. Brown, 311. 12. Soergel, 73–74. 13. Soergel, 79–80. See Alexandra Walsham’s important discussion of apparitions of angels in the English Protestant context in “Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England,” esp. 87–100. 14. Sermon von den Engeln, in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar, 1881), Schriften, vol. 3, 113, in Soergel, 74. 15. Soergel, 74. 16. Quoted in Soergel, 76. 17. Book of Revelation (12: 7–9): “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him” (20: 1–3): “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while” (RSV [New York/Glasgow: Collins, 1971], 234; 240). 18. For fuller expositions, see Bernard J. Bamberger, Fallen Angels (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1952); The Fall of the Angels, eds. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004); Rabbi Leo Jung, Fallen Angels in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1974). 19. Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 20. Reed, 1. 21. Reed, 2. 22. Reed, 2. 23. Reed, 2. 24. Reed, 2–3, whom I follow closely. In 1773, James Bruce brought three manuscripts to Europe. They contained the Mashafa Henok Nabiy, which was published and translated. This text is known as Ethiopic Enoch or 1 Enoch to distinguish it from another Enochic pseudepigraphon in Slavonic, the so-called 2 Enoch. On this, and the subsequent discovery of a Greek manuscript and then Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the twentieth century, see Reed.

Notes to pages 209–214

25. The full text is given in 1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch (Second Century B.C.-First Century A.D.), trans. E. Isaac, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983), “The Book of Enoch”; see also Langton, 107–109. 26. Langton, 108. 27. Langton, 108–109. 28. Another ancient Jewish text, the Book of Jubilees, refers to the Fall of the Rebel Angels in the days of Jared. The angels’ intentions were to teach righteous ways to humankind for they were dispatched by God. They, too, consorted with women, leading to the birth of the Naphidim. Demons seduce Noah’s descendents who complain of the demons, from whom Noah prays for release. See Langton (110–145) for further variants of these traditions, including the identity of satans and Satan through the second century B.C.E. 29. Brian P. Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, The Closed Mem, and The Gaping Jaws of Azazel,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology), eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1999), 46–61, esp. 46–47; Langton, 43–46: “IV. Azazel (The Scapegoat);” 130–132. 30. Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala,” 46–47. 31. Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala,” 49. Metatron was a “boy” who served God. He is identified with the “Agent Intellect” which Maimonides understood as the channel through which God sends prophecy to chosen mortals. 32. Reproduced in Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala,” 48, Fig. 1.11. 33. Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala,” 51. 34. In Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala,” 49. 35. “. . . for some of the chiefs of fallen angels [such as Azazel and Satan] are later regarded as the princes of evil spirits; and the union of angels with women is said to give rise to a race of giants who, in turn, become the parents of evil spirits or demons. It was thus, according to one strand of Jewish teaching, that demons originated.” Langton, 105; 105–145. 36. Smiljka Gabelic, “The Fall of Satan in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art,” Zograf 23 (1993): 64–74; Christoph Auffarth, “The Invisible Made Visible: Glimpses of an Iconography of the Fall of the Angels,” in The Fall of the Angels, eds. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, 261–285. Much of this discussion is drawn from my chapter, “Seeing, Falling, Feeling: The Sense of Angels,” in Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) (in press). 37. Fall of the Rebel Angels, Très Riches Heures (illumination on vellum) (c. 1416) (290 × 210 mm) (Musée Condé, Chantilly, inv. No. MS. 65, fol. 64v); see Larry Silver, “Jheronimus Bosch and the Issue of Origins,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1/1 (2009) (online at: http://www.jhna.org/). 38. “O Lucifer, brightest of angels all,/ Now art thou Satan, who cannot escape/Out of the misery in which thou art fallen.” Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, quoted in Silver. 39. Ross Hamilton, “Bruegel’s Falling Figures,” Viator 38/1 (2007): 385–404.

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Notes to pages 214–219

40. Silver, citing Renilde Vervoort, “The Pestilent Toad: The Significance of the Toad in the Works of Bosch,” in Hieronymus Bosch: New Insights into His Life and Work, eds. Jos Koldeweij and Bernard Vermet (Rotterdam: Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, 2001), 145–151. Bosch deployed the toad as an emblem of lust in his scenes of hell, linking it to nakedness: in his Haywain triptych and in the Garden of Earthly Delights. The building at the center of hell on the right wing of the Last Judgment triptych opens through an arch framed by toads. Silver records that Vervoort (“Pestilent Toad,” 146 n. 17) notes that a similar toad appears in the Fall of the Rebel Angels in the Mayer van den Bergh Breviary, attributed to Simon Bening (fol. 552v; ca. 1510). 41. See Chapter 1. 42. Silver, citing City of God 11, 15. As Silver also notes, Bosch was likely influenced by the popular, fourteenth-century Speculum Humanae Salvationis. 43. Domenico Beccafumi, Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on wood) (c. 1524) (347 × 227 cm; 136.600 × 98.400 ) (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena); Domenico Beccafumi, Fall of the Rebel Angels (oil on wood) (c. 1528) (347 × 225 cm; 136.600 × 88.600 ) (San Niccolò al Carmine, Siena); Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, eds. R. Bettarini and P. Barrocchi, vol. 5 (Florence, 1960–), 167–168; English translation by A. B. Hinds, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. W. Gaunt, vol. 3 (London/New York, 1963), 142–143. 44. Diana Norman surmises that Beccafumi might have been censured by the Carmelites for both his nudes and the “unstructured composition.” Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (1260–1555) (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003), 279. 45. Girolamo Savonarola, “Sermons on Amos” (1496), trans. by C. E. Gilbert, Italian Art 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1908), 157–158. As Norman (279) points out, perhaps an analogy can be drawn with Carlo Ridolfi’s account (Le maraviglie dell’arte, 1648) of the critique Titian received from the Franciscan prior of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari for making the apostles in his altarpiece for the high altar too large, so that they loomed over the Virgin. 46. Gustav Medicus, “Some Observations on Domenico Beccafumi’s Two ‘Fall of the Rebel Angels’ Panels,” Artibus et historiae 24/47 (2003): 209. In their sensitive account of the works, Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins (History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture [seventh edition] [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001/2007], 568–570) allow that the “problem may have been the representation of God the Father,” and that the artist may have “misunderstood the requirements of the commission.” Vasari also mentions a predella for the second panel, comprising five scenes in tempera “con bella e giudiziosa maniera.” Two of these may be the scenes from the legend of St. Michael now in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: The Appearance of St. Michael on the Castel Sant’Angelo (22.9 × 36.2 cm) and The Miracle of St. Michael on Mt. Gargano (22.5 × 36.5 cm) (reproduced in Hartt/Wilkins, Figs. 18.35 and 18.36). See Domenico Beccafumi e il suo tempo, ed. Alessandro Bagnoli et al. (Milan: Electa, 1990), No. 26; 172–173. The second panel acquired a marble frame in 1688, at which time the predella was dismantled. Beccafumi had been to Rome, and he may have been influenced by the fifteenth-century frescoes in the Chapel of St. Michael in SS. Apostoli, commissioned by the Greek Cardinal Bessarion.

Notes to pages 219–223

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

Both share a common source in Jacobus de Voragine’s account of the miracles of St. Michael. See Chapter 2. Master of the Rebel Angels, Fall of the Rebel Angels (1340s) (Louvre). See Medicus, 212. The author notes that the “earliest consistent pictorial tradition for the rare full-scale depiction of the Fall of the Rebel Angels theme” is a type favored by Franciscans, as in Cimabue’s fresco in the choir of the upper basilica of San Francesco, Assisi. This was followed by subjects such as Jacopo del Casentino’s Fall (1340) in the Velluti Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence; Spinello Aretino’s fresco in San Francesco, Arezzo; and Neri di Bicci’s predella panel (c. 1475) (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). See also Giovanni Previtali, “Maestro degli Angeli ribelli,” in Il Gotico a Siena: Miniature; Pitture; Oreficerie; Oggetti d’Arte (Exhibition Catalogue, Siena, 1982) (Florence: Centro Di, 1982), 215–218. On the problematic identification of the Master of the Rebel Angels, see Giulietta Dini et al., Pittura senese (Milan: Federico Motta Editore, 1997/2002), 109–111. “For when Lucifer wanted to be equal to God, the archangel Michael, standardbearer of the celestial host, marched up and expelled Lucifer and his followers out of heaven, and shut them up in this dark air until the Day of Judgment. They are not allowed to live in heaven, or in the upper part of the air, because that is a bright and pleasant place, nor on earth with us, lest they do us too much harm. They are in the air between heaven and earth, so that when they look up and see the glory they have lost, they grieve for it, and when they look down and see men ascending to the place from which they fell, they are often tormented with envy. However, by God’s design they come down upon us to test us, and, as has been shown to some holy men, they fly around us like flies. They are innumerable, and, like flies, they fill the whole air. . . . Still, innumerable as they are, Origen is of the opinion that their numbers lessen when we conquer them . . .” Jacobus de Voragine, “Saint Michael, Archangel,” The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, 205. In 1524, the Sienese had expelled the ruling Petrucci family. The Battle of Camollia that followed in 1526 was a decisive defeat of papal and Florentine forces attempting to restore them. Medicus, 212–214. Medicus, 213–214. Hartt/Wilkins, 569. Oil transferred from wood to canvas (268 × 160 cm) (Louvre); see below; Dini et al., 362–393; esp. 371–374. Medicus, 215–216; Auffarth, “The Invisible Made Visible,” 269–273, on Simon the Magician, “Model for the Cathars.” See Chapter 2. Medicus (214–216) was the first to discuss the human form of Beccafumi’s angels in light of unorthodox doctrinal tenets, including Origen’s teachings and their reception in Italy by Dante and Matteo Palmieri. The classic account for the Renaissance is Edgar Wind, “The Revival of Origen,” 412–424. See also Chapter 2. See Chapter 1. See Domenico Beccafumi e il suo tempo, Nos. 21 and 25; 152–153; 168–171; 48–49. Beccafumi, who had visited Rome before this commission, also quoted from the Hellenistic marble group, the Laocoön, as Nicole Dacos (46) suggests. Most commentators, like her, see the artist making more overt references to Roman paradigms in the second panel.

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Notes to pages 223–230

57. I owe this apt encapsulation to Richard Meyer and Sally M. Promey. 58. Clare Robertson, ‘Il Gran Cardinale’: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1992), 74–130. 59. Robertson, 76. 60. Robertson, 105. 61. Robertson, 109, Fig. 95; 105–108. 62. Robertson, 116. 63. Robertson, 117, Fig. 107. 64. Robertson, 120. 65. Robertson, 120, Fig. 111 (as Angel); 118–120. 66. There is a modello for this work in Vienna, as well as an additional drawing. See Robertson, 116; 257 n. 199 . 67. Quoted in Robertson, 120–121, from Orbaan (1920). 68. Robertson, 121. 69. I owe this and the following discussion to the insights of James Clifton, “The Face of a Fiend: Convulsion, Inversion, and the Horror of the Disempowered Body,” Oxford Art Journal 34/3 (2011): 373–392. The author kindly sent me his essay before publication. 70. These are points incisively made by Clifton. 71. On the “discomposed” body in sixteenth-century art, see Michael Cole, “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body,” Art History 24/4 (Sept. 2001): 520–551. 72. See Auffarth, “The Invisible Made Visible,” Fig. 2; 263–266. Above Lucifer’s head, the text reads: “similis ero altissimo” (“I will be like the most High.”) At his feet, the words “consilium percipit contra creatorem” (“he devises a plan against [his] creator”) and “pravitas mali consensus reperta est in quibusdam angelis” (“The wickedness of the evil agreement can be seen in some angels”), The author notes (269) the artist’s indebtedness to Byzantine formulae. 73. On possession and the upside-down figure, with comparative examples, see Clifton, 383–390. 74. See Lorenzo Lorenzi, Devils in Art: Florence, From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, trans. Mark Roberts (Florence: Centro Di, 1997), 21. 75. See Chapter 1. 76. These connections lend special resonance to the essays in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, eds. Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Surrey, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); esp. Cole, “Perpetual Exorcism in Sistine Rome,” 57–76. 77. Lorenzi, 123–125. 78. See Michael W. Cole, “Angel/Demon,” in Das Double, ed. Victor I. Stoichita (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 130. The author notes Lactantius’s observation that the Greek daimon translates into the Latin “genius.” He also elides the abilities of angels and demons to make figures in the fantasia. See also his “Demonic Arts and the Origins of the Medium.” 79. Quoted in Michael Cole, “Angel/Demon,” 123 (and in the original Latin). See, further, the same author’s more extensive and acute analysis of sixteenth and seventeenth-century art and theory in his “Discernment and Animation, Leonardo to Lomazzo,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Emory University, Lovis Corinth Colloquia I), eds. Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 133–161.

Notes to pages 230–234

80. Cole, “Angel/Demon,” 124. 81. Trattato [. . .] de la emulatione, che il Demonio ha fatta a Dio, ne l’adoratione, ne’ sacrifice, 7 ne le altre cose appartenenti all diuintà (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1563), in Cole, “Angel/Demon,” 124 (and text in Latin). Gilio continues: “Ma in che modo parla? Alcuni dicono, che l’Angelo guardando ne la Diuina essenza, come in uno limpidissimo specchio, conosce per cognitione matutina la uoluntà di Dio, laquale in se stesso riceuuta, in se stesso la riuela a gli altri Angeli inferiori, e da quelli a gli huomini. Questa uoluntà riuelata da Dio a l’Angelo, e da l’Angelo a l’altro Angelo, si chiama lingua de gli Angeli: percioche meglio lo Angelo intende ne l’essere de l’altro Angelo la uoluntà di Dio, che non fa l’huomo per mezzo de la uoce la uoluntà de l’altro huomo. Ecco adunque il primo modo de parlare, che fa Iddio a gli Angeli, a la beata Vergine, 7 a tutti gli altri santi. Parla ancora iddio in sogno . . .” 82. Il Figino, 98 (and text in Italian; trans. is Cole’s, “Angel/Demon,” 124–125). For the original text, see The Figino or On the Purpose of Painting: Art Theory in the Later Renaissance, eds. Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino (Toronto/ Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 77. 83. Cole, 125. 84. Cole, 131; Kristina Hermann Fiore, “Gli angeli nella teoria e nella pittura di Federico Zuccari,” in Federico Zuccari. Le idee, gli scritti, ed. Bonita Cleri (Milan: Electa, 1997), 89–110. 85. The Cavalier d’Arpino remarked that Guido Reni’s works for the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore were made by an angel, as reported by Malvasia. Cole, 131; Richard Spear, The “Devine” Guido. Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 109; 262. 86. Cole, 131; Spear, 34. It is no coincidence that the cover of Bellori’s Lives (1672) shows a winged genius figure holding a paint brush. The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition, eds. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, and Tommaso Montanari (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 87. Due dialogi, ed. Paola Barrocchi (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1986), 121r. 88. “E per non voler allegare tute l’auttorità de la Scrittura, che in molti luoghi si proua e petialmente ne lo apocalisse, basta à concludere, che per ogni rispetto di deue à gli Angeli far l’ali. Si e perche non paiano puri huomini, si per mostrare la loro velocità; & si deue dipingerli anco giouini bellissimi, perche cosi sono appariti, e per fali differenti da i Demonii, che vogliono essere bruttissimi, acciò spauentino, si come quelli consolano.” 89. Caterina Bernardi Salvetti, S. Maria degli Angeli alle Terme e Antonio Lo Duca (Rome: Desclée & Co., 1965). 90. These were: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Selaphiel, Jegudiel, Barchiel, and Uriel. 91. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 242–244. 92. See Marshall and Walsham, 23. 93. See Philpot, 164–166. 94. Philpot, 164. For the old sacristy of their Roman church at Sant’Agostino, the friars commissioned Antiveduto Grammatica to paint an image that is now lost. Guercino also depicted this subject for the Augustinians in Fano, among other examples. 95. Philpot, 166. 96. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 10 vols. (Rome: Tipografia Vaticana, 1588– 1607); Robert Bellarmine, The Mind’s Ascent to God (1615), in Robert Bellarmine:

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Notes to pages 234–235

Spiritual Writings, trans. and ed. J. Patrick Donnelly and Roland J. Teske (New York: Paulist Press, 1989); Trevor Johnson, “Guardian Angels and the Society of Jesus,” in Marshall and Walsham, 192–193. 97. I am grateful to Steven F. Ostrow for pointing me to most of these sources, and especially for a copy of his important paper (“Caravaggio’s Angels,” in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, eds. L. Pericolo and D. Stone [Surrey, UK/ Burlington, VT: Ashgate] [forthcoming]). 98. The Catechism of the Council of Trent published by command of Pope Pius the Fifth, trans. J. Donovan (New York: Christian Press Association, 1905), 29, in Ostrow. 99. Bailey, 243. On the Chapel of the Angels, see also Golda Balass, “Five Hierarchies of Intercessors for Salvation: The Decoration of the Angels’ Chapel in the Gesù,” Artibus et historiae 24/47 (2003): 177–208; Alessandro Zuccari, “Bellarmino e la prima iconografia gesuitica: La Cappella degli Angeli al Gesù,” in Bellarmino e la Controriforma: Atti del simposio internazionale di studi, Sora 15–18 ottobre 1986, eds. Romeo de Maio et al. (Sora: Centro di Studi Sorani “Vincenzo Patriarca,” 1990), 609–628. 100. Hermann Fiore, 90, Fig. 1. 101. Hermann Fiore, 94–95. 102. Bailey, 243; Hermann Fiore, 90–91. 103. Hermann Fiore (Fig. 2) gives a helpful diagram of Zuccari’s schema. 104. Hermann Fiore, 97.

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Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Joseph, John E. “The Tongues of Men and of Angels: Knowledge, Inner Speech and Diglossia in Medieval Linguistic Thought.” Flores Grammaticae: Essays in Memory of Vivien Law. Eds. Nicola McLelland and Andrew R. Linn. Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2005, 119–139. Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival. Ed. Edward E. Lowinsky in collaboration with Bonnie J. Blackburn. London: Oxford University Press, 1976. Keck, David. Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kessler, Herbert L. Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. (The Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. King, Catherine. “The Dowry Farms of Niccolosa Serragli and the Altarpiece of the Assumption in the National Gallery, London (1126) ascribed to Francesco Botticini.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50 (1987): 275–278. “The Liturgical and Commemorative Allusions in Raphael’s Transfiguration and Failure to Heal.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 148–159. Kleinbub, Christian K. “At the Boundaries of Sight: The Italian Renaissance Cloud Putto.” Renaissance Theories of Vision. Eds. John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman. Surrey, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, 117–133. “Raphael’s Transfiguration as Visio-Devotional Program.” The Art Bulletin 90/3 (2008): 367–393. Vision and the Visionary in Raphael. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. Koch, Josef. “Über die Lichtsymbolik im Bereich der Philosophie und der Mystik des Mittelalters.” Studium Generale 13 (1960): 653–670. Kohl, Benjamin G. Padua under the Carrara, 1318–1405. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Land, Norman. “Reconstructing a Reconstruction: Altobello Melone’s Picenardi Altarpiece.” Muse: Annual of the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri–Columbia 31–32 (1997–1998): 9–23. Langton, Edward. Essentials of Demonology: A Study of Jewish and Christian Doctrine, Its Origin and Development. London: Epworth Press, 1949. Leclerq, Henri. “Marie (Je vous salue).” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie. Vol. 10, Part 2. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1932, 2041–2062. Lee, Egmont. Sixtus IV and Men of Letters. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. London: Scolar, 1984 (La naissance du Purgatoire [Paris: Gallimard, 1981]). Lightbown, Ronald W. “Heaven Depicted in 15th-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture.” Mosaics of Friendship: Studies in Art and History for Eve Borsook. Ed. Ornella Francisci Osti. Florence: Centro Di, 1999, 81–95.

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Selected Bibliography

Schwartz, Howard. Gabriel’s Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Shearman, John. Andrea del Sarto. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602). New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2003. “Raphael’s Clouds, and Correggio’s.” Studi su Raffaello: Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi. (Urbino-Firenze 6–14 aprile 1984.) Eds. Micaela Sambucco Hamoud and Maria Letizia Strocchi. Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987, 657–668. “The ‘Dead Christ’ by Rosso Fiorentino.” Boston Museum Bulletin 64/338 (1966): 148–172. Silver, Larry. “Jheronimus Bosch and the Issue of Origins.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1/1 (2009) (available online at: http://www.jhna.org/). Simoncelli, Paolo. Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, 1979. Spear, Richard. The “Devine” Guido. Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Stefaniak, Regina. “Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso’s Dead Christ with Angels.” Renaissance Quarterly 45/4 (Winter 1992): 677–738. Strainchamps, Edmond. “Marco da Gagliano and the Compagnia dell’Arcangelo Raffaello in Florence: An Unknown Episode in the Composer’s Life.” Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore. Eds. Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus. Florence: La Nuova Editrice, 1978, 473–488. Suarez-Nani, Tiziana. Les anges et la philosophie: subjectivité et function cosmologique des substances séparées à la fin du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002. Connaissance et langage des anges selon Thomas d’Aquin et Gilles de Rome. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2002. Summers, David. “‘ARIA II’: The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art.” Artibus et historiae 10/20 (1989): 15–31. Swarzenski, Georg. “Insinuationes divinae pietatis.” Festschrift Heinrich Wölfflin. Munich: Schmid, 1924, 65–74. Tarr, Roger. “‘Visibile parlare’: The Spoken Word in Fourteenth-Century Central Italian Painting.” Word and Image 13 (1997): 223–244. Taylor, Matthew. Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475): Florentine Humanist and Politician. Florence: European University Institute [thesis], 1986. That Liberal and Virtuous Art: Three Humanist Treatises on Music: Aegidius Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris, Carlo Valgulio. Ed. D. Cullington. Belfast: University of Ulster, 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca. Ed. Jeryldene M. Wood. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The Fall of the Angels. Eds. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004.

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Selected Bibliography

“On Angel Concerts in the 15th Century: A Critical Approach to Realism and Symbolism in Sacred Painting.” The Musical Quarterly 49/4 (Oct. 1963): 450–463. Wright, J. Edward. The Early History of Heaven. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Zinn, Grover A. Jr. “Exegesis and Spirituality in the Writings of Gregory the Great.” Forms of Devotion: Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism. Ed. Everett Ferguson. New York/London: Garland Publishing, 1999, 198–210. Zuccari, Alessandro. “Bellarmino e la prima iconografia gesuitica: La Cappella degli Angeli al Gesù.” Bellarmino e la Controriforma: Atti del simposio internazionale di studi, Sora 15–18 ottobre 1986. Eds. Romeo de Maio et al. Sora: Centro di Studi Sorani “Vincenzo Patriarca,” 1990, 609–628.

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INDEX

Abraham, 6, 68, 69, 135, 142 Abulafia Abraham ben Samuel, 144 Abulafia, Abraham ben Samuel, 144, 145, 146, 172 Acarya Atisa, 6 Adam, 35, 64, 68, 111, 137, 141, 148, 172, 216 Adoration of the Shepherds, 57, 124 Aegidius Carlerius, 309 Agathias, 83 Agostino Veneziano Pietà, 163 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 144, 146 Albert the Great, 18, 40 Albertini, Francesco, 234 Aldus Manutius, 138 Alemanno, Yohanan, 142 Alexander of Hales, 18, 37 Alexander VI Borgia, Pope, 138 Alfonso V of Aragon, King, 42, 54, 89 Ambrose, St., 76, 78, 176 angel. See Nine Orders; PseudoDionysius “neutral,” 45, 85, 86, 87, 88, 222 Angels (as order), 17, 23, 24, 38, 41, 57, 60, 61, 69, 77, 80, 84, 233 Archangels, 17, 23, 24, 35, 41, 60, 69, 77, 80, 102, 171, 175, 177, 199,

209, 212, 232, 233, See Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael Azael, 210 Azazel, 144, 145, 209, 210, 211 bread of, 40, 153, 156 Calogenius, 86 Cherubim, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 34, 38, 41, 57, 60, 69, 72, 76, 77, 80, 83, 84, 96, 114, 119, 123, 124, 132, 139, 140, 143, 156, 197, 199, 202, 208, 212, 216, 232, 300 communication, 28, 33, 100, 103, 108, 146, 230 Dominations, 17, 22, 54, 57, 60, 69, 70, 77, 80 Emmanuel, 33, 34, 35 fallen angels, 36, 37, 40, 43, 47, 100, 144, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 221, 223, 227, 228, See Rebel Angels, Fall of guardian angel, 24, 33, 37, 69, 177, 185, 233, 234 Lucifer, 25, 36, 37, 43, 85, 86, 89, 90, 189, 203, 204, 207, 208, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 228 Metatron, 144, 145, 146, 211 Powers, 7, 17, 22, 57, 60, 69, 70, 72, 77, 80, 102

313

314

efh

Index

angel (cont.) Principalities, 7, 17, 22, 57, 60, 69, 70, 72, 77, 80, 96 Rebel Angels, Fall of, 13, 43, 85, 86, 90, 100, 139, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 214, 216, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 233, 234, 306 Sapiel, 33, 34, 35, 38 Seraphim, 4, 5, 7, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 36, 38, 42, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 72, 76, 80, 83, 85, 87, 96, 108, 114, 123, 124, 125, 132, 139, 140, 143, 156, 160, 197, 199, 212, 216, 226 Thrones, 17, 22, 41, 57, 60, 69, 70, 72, 77, 80, 139, 140 Uzza, 210 Virtues, 17, 23, 39, 57, 60, 69, 70, 72, 77, 80, 102 wings, 3, 11, 22, 33, 34, 76, 108, 112, 114, 132, 150, 182, 200, 221, 230, 232 Angelico, Fra, 12, 91, 92, 97, 107, 109, 112, 156, 198, 308 Annunciation, 106 Annunciation (Cortona), 10, 110 Annunciation (San Marco), 15 Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, 124 Coronation of the Virgin (Louvre), 156 Coronation of the Virgin (San Domenico), 92 Coronation of the Virgin (San Marco), 94 Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi), 8, 117 Last Judgment (Berlin), 96 Last Judgment (San Marco), 91, 95, 117 Anne, St., 47 Annunciation, 6, 10, 12, 15, 35, 75, 77, 83, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 122, 129, 134, 147, 148, 301, 304, 308, 310 Annunciation to the Shepherds, 83 Antonello da Messina Virgin of the Annunciation, 107

Antoniazzo Romano, 78, 80, 81, 132, 310 Antoninus, St., 129, 130, 188, 191 Antonio di Tommaso, 187 Apollo, 117, 195 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 3, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 22, 29, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 52, 55, 57, 74, 95, 97, 108, 109, 129, 130, 131, 136, 154, 155, 197, 230, 233, 297, 298 Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, 12, 58, 75, 76, 302, 309, 310 Arcangelo Raffaello, Compagnia dell’, 179, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Arditio, Fabio, 226 Arezzo, 12, 103, 148 San Francesco, 148 Argus, 176 aria, 8, 9 Aristotle, 11, 18, 38, 39, 41, 55, 61, 83, 136, 145, 154, 304 Ascension of Christ, 12, 58, 132 Asclepius, 195 Assisi San Francesco, 56 Assumption of the Virgin, 12, 57, 58, 83, 85, 90, 115, 127, 129, 131, 164, 165, 188, 202 Aubert, St., 81 Augustine, St., 4, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 28, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 54, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65, 74, 76, 77, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 108, 114, 136, 138, 149, 155, 176, 177, 204, 209, 214, 216, 222, 229, 230, 233, 235, 297, 298, 299, 303, 304, 306 City of God, 16, 17, 43, 44, 62, 65, 91, 92, 216, 229, 233 De Trinitate, 17, 92, 95 Enchiridion, 92 Augustinians, 33, 74, 233 Averroës, 40

egh

Index

Balaam, 103 Baldovinetti, Alessio Annunciation, 106, 107 Bandinelli, Baccio, 165 Barnaba da Modena Coronation of the Virgin, 123 Baronio, Cesare, 234 Barontus’s Vision (Visio Baronti), 172, 176, 178, 196 Bartolomeo, Fra, 123, 198 Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, 198 Basil, St., 117 Batholomew, St., 123 Baxandall, Michael, 105, 107 Beatific Vision, 19, 48, 65, 93, 95 Beatrice, 11, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 50, 59, 85, 101, 177 Beccafumi, Domenico, 13, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 302, 306 Fall of the Rebel Angels, 217, 227, 228 Béda, Noël, 138 Bede, 176 Bellarmine, Robert, 234 Bellini, Giovanni, 127 Bellori, Giovan Pietro, 231 Benedict, St., 24, 25, 227 Benedictines, 24, 85, 146, 186 Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 1, 22, 24, 25, 41, 47, 101, 147 Bernardino of Siena, St., 61, 95, 129 Bertoja, Jacopo, 224, 226 Fall of the Rebel Angels, 225 Bessarion, Cardinal Basilios, 12, 58, 62, 63, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 132, 306 Bicci di Lorenzo Annunciation, 112, 114 Crucifixion with Raphael and Tobias, 177 Boethius, 124 Boethius of Dacius, 102 Boëtius à Bolswert Anima Dissolving Under the Fiery Breath of Divine Love, 161 Divine Love Covering the Eyes of the Soul to Protect Her From Temptation, 160

Bologna Santa Maria della Concezione, 133 Bonaventure, St., 3, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 35, 39, 41, 52, 55, 97, 101, 173 Borgia, Lucrezia, 103 Borromeo, Cardinal Federico, 235 Bosch, Hieronymus, 213, 221 Apocalypse by Fire, 216 Haywain triptych, 216 Last Judgment triptych, 216 World Before the Flood, 214 Botticelli, Sandro, 47, 49, 87, 89, 178, 300, 306, 308 Annunciation, 106, 107 Mystic Nativity, 117 Trinity with Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, Tobias, and Raphael, 181 Botticini, Francesco, 85, 87, 88, 90, 178, 181, 298, 301, 305, 310 Assumption of the Virgin, 58, 114, 124, 164 Three Archangels with Tobias, 179 Bronzino Agnolo, 162 Brown, Peter, 206 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 43, 216, 221 Fall of the Rebel Angels, 213 Bruno, Giordano, 146 Bugiardini, Giuliano Scenes from the Story of Tobias, 179 Buonafé, Leonardo, 166 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 21, 101 Cajetan, Tommaso de Vio, 154, 155 Caprarola Villa Farnese, 224 Carafa, Cardinal Oliviero, 129, 131 Carlerius, Aegidius, 115 Carmelites, 216, 221, 224 Carnevale, Fra Annunciation, 106 Carpaccio, Vittore, 62, 65, 127 Carrara (family), 11, 54, 65, 68, 69, 74, 305, 307

315

316

efh

Index

Casella, 48 Castiglione, Baldassare, 195 Castiglione, Taddeo, 162 Catarino, Ambrogio, 230 Cato, 48 Cavallini, Pietro, 76 Cecilia, St., 116 Cellini, Benvenuto, 165 Charles IV of Bohemia, King, 69 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 221, 226 Charon, 41 Chartres, 76, 178 Chase, Steven, 27 Chonae, 82 church fathers, 15, 16, 48, 54, 76, 77, 79, 84, 91, 111, 117, 120, 229 Cicero, 124, 156 Cicognini, Jacopo, 190 Cima da Conegliano, 127, 299 Archangel Raphael with Tobias Between SS. Nicholas and James Major, 183 Nativity with SS. Helen and Catherine of Alexandria, Archangel Raphael, and Tobias, 183 Civate San Pietro al Monte, 56 Clark, Kenneth, 49 Claudia, St., 78 Clement of Alexandria, 121 Clement VII de’ Medici, Pope, 203, 221 Clement X Altieri, Pope, 233 Cola di Rienzo, 26 Colonna (family), 75 Colonna, Antonio, 75 Colonna, Vittoria, 158, 159, 160, 161, 306 Comanini, Gregorio, 230, 232 Comedy, 297, 299, 300, 303, 306, 308 communion of saints, 90, 92, 95, 97 Condivi, Ascanio, 99, 205 Constantine, 148 Constantinople, 80, 83 Coppo di Marcovaldo, 55, 59 Corinthians, 9, 30

Coronation of the Virgin, 8, 12, 57, 58, 83, 84, 90, 92, 94, 114, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 156, 165, 308 Coronation of the Virgin, 308 Corpus Domini, 187, 188 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 13, 202, 309 Assumption of the Virgin, 202 Cosmé Tura, 115 Virgin and Child Enthroned, 115, 167 Costa, Lorenzo, 57, 310 Adoration of the Shepherds with Angels, 124 Cotton Genesis, 4 Crucifixion, 8, 22, 23, 76, 78, 114, 129, 177 Cumaean Sibyl, 85, 86, 87, 130 Cyprian, 177 Cyprian (Bishop of Carthage), St., 98 Daddi, Bernardo, 29 dance, 91, 95, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 131, 165, 198 Dandolo, Doge Andrea, 72 Daniel, 4, 68, 69, 172, 225 Dante Alighieri, 2, 3, 6, 11, 16, 23, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 59, 61, 62, 85, 86, 89, 101, 108, 119, 124, 177, 222, 235, 297, 300, 301, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310 Convivio, 11, 39, 40, 43 De vulgari eloquentia, 32 Divine Comedy, 3, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 50, 52, 59, 85, 101, 119 Dati, Leonardo, 87, 89, 91 David, 68, 112, 113, 116, 120 Dee, John, 146, 209 demon, 3, 5, 16, 17, 29, 37, 41, 58, 70, 72, 86, 95, 101, 102, 144, 172, 173, 193, 195, 196, 197, 205, 206, 210, 211, 214, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232 Asmodeus, 174, 175 Denis, St., 18 d’Este, Duke Alfonso, 103

egh

Index

d’Este, Isabella, 103, 111, 231 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 107 Dominic, St., 96, 187 Dominicans, 15, 25, 39, 87, 91, 95, 111, 124, 129, 130, 154, 156, 186, 191 Donatello, 4 Cavalcanti Altar, 4, 132 Doni, Ottavio, 181 Duca, Fra Antonio del, 232, 233 Duccio di Buoninsegna, 8 Maestà, 8 Dürer, Albrecht Revelation of St. John, 212, 219 Eck, Johannes, 156 Eden, 34, 39, 216 Egidio da Viterbo, Cardinal, 97 Elijah, 68, 69 Elysium, 86 Empyrean, 38, 41, 42, 52, 53, 222 Engelpietà, 158, 159, 163 Enoch, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 172, 208, 209, 210, 211, 222, See also Enoch, Book of Enoch, Book of, 122, 172, 208, 209, 210 Erasmus, Desiderius, 138, 307 Eriugena, Johannes Scotus, 18, 19, 21, 26, 61, 112, 113, 300, 303 Eucharist, 97, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 188, 231 Eugenia, St., 78 Eugenius IV Condulmer, Pope, 75, 186, 189 Evangelists, 66, 72, 76, 77, 79, 84, 91, 103, 135, 154, 193, 196, 199, 207, 208 Eve, 35, 47, 68, 100, 111, 216, 305 Exodus, 4, 120, 233 Ezekiel, 4, 7, 207, 208, 232 Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro, 224, 226, 233 Ferrante of Aragon, King, 54 Ferrara, 103, 121 Ferrari, Gaudenzio Assumption of the Virgin, 115, 116, 133

Ficino, Marsilio, 54, 119, 120, 136, 144, 145, 147, 297, 307 Fiesole Badia, 85 San Domenico, 92, 124 Florence, 4, 33, 54, 55, 61, 85, 86, 90, 101, 138, 171, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 223, 233, 298, 302, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 310 Badia, 181 Baptistery, 55, 61, 73 Duomo, 116, 188, 235 Misericordia, confraternity of, 177, 179 Ognissanti, 165 San Gallo, 162 San Marco, 15, 91, 92, 94, 95, 103, 117, 188, 191 San Pier Maggiore, 58, 85, 87 San Silvestro, 187 Santa Croce, 4, 123 Santa Lucia in Settimello (near Florence), 168 Santa Maria degli Angeli, 138 Santa Maria Nuova, Ospedale di, 166 Sant’Elizabetta delle Convertite, 181 Santo Spirito, 179, 181 SS. Annunziata, 164, 168, 188 Forlì, See also Melozzo Fra Angelico Annunciation (Missal 558), 103 Francis I of France, King, 222, 226 Francis, St., 22, 23, 25, 47, 96, 116 Franciscans, 22, 25, 33, 39, 55, 81, 148 Freccero, John, 45 Gabriel, Archangel, 10, 12, 15, 24, 43, 69, 75, 77, 83, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 129, 130, 146, 148, 162, 168, 170, 171, 179, 209, 212, 230, 309, See angel Geertgen tot Sint Jans Virgin and Child, 123 Gelli, Giovan Battista, 88

317

318

efh

Index

Genesis, 6, 17, 20, 24, 34, 38, 68, 91, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 154, 203, 208, 214 Gentile da Fabriano, 75 Valle Romita Polyptych, 123 George of Trebizond, 83, 306 Gikatilla, Joseph, 141, 142 Giles of Rome (Egidio Romano), 58, 74, 75 Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, 205, 230, 232 Giotto, 8, 56, 66, 122, 299, 301, 304 Baroncelli Polyptych, 123 Giovan Battista di Bartolomeo, 187 Giovanni d’Alemagna (with Antonio Vivarini) Coronation of the Virgin, 84 Giovanni d’Aragona, Cardinal, 54 Giovanni di Paolo, 3, 42, 43, 46, 50, 101 Giovanni di Piermatteo da Camerino Boccati Madonna of the Orchestra (Madonna and Child with Musical and Singing Angels), 123 Giovenale da Orvieto, 77 Giulio Romano Fall of the Giants, 226 Glossa Ordinaria, 20, 173 Gonzaga, Aloysius, 234 Gonzaga, Federigo, II, 226 Gregory the Great, Pope, 11, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 42, 49, 57, 58, 59, 61, 76, 77, 78, 81, 156, 157, 172, 308, 311 Grosseteste, Robert, 18 Guariento di Arpo, 11, 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 301 Guglielmo Ebreo, 121 heaven, 5, 11, 22, 24, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41, 42, 50, 52, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 75, 76, 78, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101, 102, 114, 118, 119, 127, 129, 132, 135, 139, 141, 145, 173, 177, 189, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 218, 219, 222, 225, 228, 231

hell, 41, 45, 47, 48, 86, 95, 173, 204, 218, 219, 221, 303, 310 Hesiod, 119 Horace, 88 Hortus deliciarum, 228 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 18, 20, 21, 35, 61, 176 Hugo, Hermann Pia Desiderata, 160 Iamblichus, 138, 303 Iconoclasm, 82 Ignatius Loyola, St., 227, 233 Incarnation, 15, 87, 103, 125, 129, 130, 208 Innocent VIII Cibo, Pope, 136 Isaac, 68, 69, 135, 142 Isaiah, 4, 7, 17, 114, 144, 207, 228, 232 Islam, 1, 122, 298 Isolano, Isidoro, 57 Jacob, 68, 120, 134, 140, 141, 142, 187 Jacob’s ladder, 12, 24, 135, 140, 141, 142, 146, 187, 225, 233, 234 Jacobello del Fiore Coronation of the Virgin, 83, 123 James, St., 183 Jeremiah, 69 Jerome, St., 62, 76, 77, 86, 89, 138, 166, 167, 176, 187, 192 Jerusalem, 20, 22, 23, 47, 130, 148, 176, 204 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 224, 233 Job, 28, 58, 140, 177, 208 John the Baptist, St., 47, 78, 90, 114, 166, 178, 181, 183, 188, 189 John the Evangelist, St., 34, 86, 90, 96, 102, 116, See Evangelists; Revelation Jonah, 176, 205 Joseph, 68, 69 Joseph, St., 57, 104, 111 Judges, 229

egh

Index

Judith, 69, 171 Julius II della Rovere, Pope, 200, 203, See Giuliano della Rovere

Luther, Martin, 151, 153, 154, 170, 171, 177, 206, 207, 208, 221, 229, 233

Kabbalah, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 172, 209, 210, 211 Kings, 68, 208, 229 kiss, 27, 91

Maccabees, 171 Maimonides, Moses, 172 Man of Sorrows, 153, 156, 157, 162 Mantegna, Andrea Camera Picta (Mantua), 226 Man of Sorrows with a Seraph and a Cherub, 156 Mantua, 121 Palazzo del Tè, 226 Martin V Colonna, Pope, 57, 58, 75, 78, 197 Mary Magdalene, 92, 182, 187 Masaccio, 58, 75 Masolino da Panicale, 58, 75 Assumption of the Virgin, 57 Master of the St. Lucy Legend Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 127 Medici, Cardinal Giulio de’, 193, 195 Medici, de’, 195, 221, See Pope Clement VII; Pope Pius IV Medici, Lorenzo de’, 54, 136, 222 Medici, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’, 47 Melozzo da Forlì, 12, 78, 300, 302 Ascension of Christ (SS. Apostoli, Rome), 132 Methodius of Olympus, 7 Michael the Archangel, St., 25, 43, 58, 69, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 90, 102, 122, 146, 149, 150, 168, 170, 171, 173, 179, 189, 206, 209, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 231, 235, See angel Michelangelo Buonarroti, 13, 64, 97, 99, 152, 158, 160, 203, 216, 221, 233, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 306, 310 Last Judgment, 13, 98, 203, 205, 206, 210, 226, 228, 232 Punishment of Haman, 223 Separation of Light from Darkness, 203

Landino, Cristoforo, 88 Last Judgment, 12, 48, 55, 62, 72, 76, 81, 95, 96, 98, 117, 122, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210, 216, 226, 228, 232, 299, 300, 303 Leo X de’ Medici, Pope, 195, 222 Leonard, St., 168 Leonardo da Vinci, 9, 178, 299, 301, 310 Tobias and the Angel, 180 Leviticus, 210 Ligozzi, Jacopo, 233 Limbourg Brothers Fall of the Rebel Angels, 212 Lippi, Filippino, 12, 108, 131, 178, 303, 310 Annunciation (Carafa Chapel, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome), 129, 197 Annunciation (tondi), 108 Assumption of the Virgin (Carafa Chapel, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome), 129 Coronation of the Virgin, 84 Lippi, Filippo Madonna della Cintola, 181 locutio, 10, 28, 32, 58, 108 Lombard, Peter, 36 Loreto, 233 Lot, 68 Louis XI of France, King, 81 Luca della Robbia Cantoria, 116, 186 Lucian, 119 Lucifer. See angel Lucy, St., 47

319

320

efh

Index

Milan, 121 Milton, John, 43, 120, 307, 310 Miriam, 120 mirrors, 3, 32, 40, 42, 43, 95 Monica, St., 64, 114 Monte Gargano, 82, 102 Monte, Cardinal Antonio Maria Ciocchi del, 232 Mont-Saint-Michel, 80, 82, 303 Morelli, Leonardo di Lorenzo, 168 Moses, 140, 210 music, 8, 12, 41, 57, 83, 84, 100, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 143, 167, 171, 186, 189, 202 Napier, Richard, 146, 147 Naples, 42, 54, 55, 89, 301 Nativity, 83, 114, 117, 125, 129, 183, 186, 187, 189 Nebuchadnezzar, 68, 69 Neoplatonism, 19, 35, 39, 54, 62, 63, 64, 112, 116, 119, 121, 122, 136, 141, 144, 146, 229 Nephilim, 208 Neri di Bicci, 179 Coronation of the Virgin, 114 Neri, St. Filippo, 235 Nicea, Second Council of, 7 Nicholas of Bari, St., 114 Nicholas of Cusa, 54 Nicholas, St., 183 Nimrod, 49 Nine Choirs. See also Nine Orders, See Nine Orders Nine Orders, 7, 11, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 42, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 65, 72, 74, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 115, 119, 124, 125, 139, 160, 199, 233, 234, See Pseudo-Dionysius Noah, 68, 142, 172, 204, 209, 214, 216 Numbers, 103 numerology, 19, 35, 116, 119, 146, 211

Origen, 13, 36, 85, 86, 88, 89, 108, 135, 137, 138, 145, 176, 204, 210, 222, 310 Ostia, 22, 64, 91 Pacher, Michael Coronation of the Virgin, 128 Padua, 11, 26, 54, 65, 72, 74, 83, 121, 172, 304, 305, 307 Eremitani, church of, 12, 72, 74, 301, 302 Reggia (palace of the Carrara), 65, 69, 72, 73, 74 Scrovegni Chapel, 8, 56, 122 Palermo Sant’Angelo, 232 Pallas, 140 Palmieri, Matteo, 58, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 137, 138, 189, 298, 299, 301, 302, 309 Città di Vita, 85, 87, 89, 90, 222 Vita Civile, 90 Palmieri, Mattia, 298 Panormita, Antonio, 55 Paolo Veneziano Coronation of the Virgin, 126, 127 Parenti, Marco, 55, 308 Paris, 18, 302, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 310 Abbey of Saint-Victor. See Hugh and Richard University of, 3, 22 Parma, 224 Duomo, 202 San Giovanni Evangelista, 202 Parmigianino, 9 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 9 Parri Spinelli, 148 Passion, 47, 57, 77, 84, 124, 125, 156, 157, 161, 164, 205, 309 Paul III Farnese, Pope, 226 Paul V Borghese, Pope, 233 Paul, St., 9, 17, 18, 54, 64, 92, 96, 98, 118, 139, 140, 154, 205, 230, 299, 301, 306

egh

Index

Pavia, 17 San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, 17 Perugino, Pietro, 178 Pesaro, 121 Peter Lombard, 36 Peter, St., 47, 96, 173, 176, 196, 200, 204, 216 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 74, 303, 307 Phlegyas, 41 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 2, 12, 39, 54, 88, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 172, 208, 209, 210, 211, 301, 306 Piero della Francesca, 12, 103, 132, 148, 149, 302, 309, 310 Annunciation, 148 Baptism of Christ, 148 Brera Altarpiece, 150 Montefeltro Altarpiece, 148 St. Michael, 149 Piero di Cosimo Madonna and Child with SS. Dominic and Jerome, 187 Piero di Puccio, 56 Pisa, 56 Camposanto, 56 Pius II Piccolomini, Pope, 80 Pius IV de’ Medici, Pope, 232, 233 Plato, 16, 39, 54, 83, 86, 92, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 138, 147 Plotinus, 92, 119, 120, 143 Pollaiuolo, Antonio and Piero del, 178 Tobias and the Angel, 180, 182 Pontormo, Jacopo, 162 Prepositinus of Cremona, 36 Primum Mobile, 38, 42, 50, 55 prisca theologia, 135 Psalms, 5, 25, 39, 63, 115, 116, 124, 136, 139, 233 Pseudo-Dionysius., 8, 11, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 36, 40, 41, 42, 52, 54, 57, 61, 62, 69, 72, 77, 82, 93, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 130, 136,

139, 140, 141, 199, 230, 233, 234, 298, 306, See angel; Nine Orders Ptolemy, 61 Pulci, Luigi, 88 Purgatory, 41, 48, 49, 305 putto, 4, 84, 123, 129, 131, 132, 151, 164, 171, 186, 197, 198, 199, 200, 226 Pythagoras, 124, 140, 147, 211, 304, 305 Raffaellino da Reggio, 225 Raphael, 13, 15, 20, 97, 131, 171, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 221, 301, 302, 305, 309 Chigi Chapel (Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome), 200 Disputà (or Theology), 97, 197, 199 Expulsaion of Heliodorus, 200 Liberation of St. Peter, 200 Madonna di Foligno, 200 Madonna of the Fish, 192 Sistine Madonna, 200 St. Michael, 222, 223 The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, 196 Transfiguration, 193, 227 Raphael, Archangel, 10, 20, 102, 146, 147, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 209, See angel confraternity. See Arcangelo Raffaello Reginald of Piperno, 31 religious orders, 24, 62, 81, 224 Reni, Guido, 231 resurrection, 29, 31, 64, 95, 109, 205 Reuchlin, Johannes, 144, 209 Revelation, 4, 25, 85, 102, 116, 122, 207, 213, 219, 228 Richard of Middleton, 10 Richard of Saint-Victor, 6, 11, 28 Rinuccini, Alamanno, 87 Riofreddo, 12, 58, 75, 76, 77, 80, 83, 226, 298, 299, 300, 308 Roberto da Caracciolo, Fra, 105

321

322

efh

Index

Rome, 6, 12, 13, 26, 58, 65, 78, 81, 83, 123, 152, 153, 171, 206, 221, 224, 231, 232, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 308, 309 Castel Sant’Angelo, 26, 81, 225 Catacomb of the Giordani, 177 Diocletian, Baths of, 232 Gesù, 233, 234 Palazzo Colonna, 78 Palazzo Zuccari, 235 S. Maria del Popolo, 13 San Clemente, 75, 77 San Giovanni in Laterano, 75 Santa Cecilia, 76 Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, 232 Santa Maria del Popolo, 200 Santa Maria Maggiore, 6, 57, 58, 75, 81, 303, 308 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, 12, 129, 197 Santissima Trinità dei Monti, 203 SS. Apostoli, 12, 58, 78, 81, 82, 132, 302 Rosselli, Cosimo, 187 Rosso Fiorentino, 156, 158, 171, 188, 199 Angel Playing a Lute, 167 Assumption of the Virgin, 164, 199 Dead Christ with Angels, 152, 154, 156, 161, 164 Deposition, 164 Pietà, 152 Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbott, Stephen, and Jerome (Ognissanti), 165, 168 Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Elizabeth and Two Angels, 168 Rovere, Giuliano della, 81 Rubens, Peter Paul The Miracles of St. Ignatius Loyola (Antwerp), 227 Rucellai, Cipriano, 89 Rufinus, 87

Sallustius, 156 Samacchini, Orazio Madonna and Child with Angel Musicians, St Petronius, and Mary Magdalene, 133 Samael, 144, 211 Samuel, 120 Sansepolcro, 152, 153 Sant’Angelo in Vado, 235 Sarah, 6, 173, 174, 175, 197 Saronno Santuario della Beata Vergine dei Miracoli, 115 Sarrazin, Jean, 18 Sarto, Andrea del, 168, 171 Annunciation (1512) (Palazzo Pitti), 168 Annunciation (1528) (Palazzo Pitti), 168 Annunciation (c. 1512–1513), 162 Pietà, 163, 164 Tobias Altarpiece, 168, 170 Satan, 28, 29, 49, 144, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 223, 229, 303 Savoldo, Giovanni Girolamo, 178 Tobias and the Angel, 183 Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 191, 219 Scaliger, Joseph, 209 scholasticism, 3, 11, 35, 36, 60, 100, 107, 108, 136, 145, 151, 155, 233 Scorel, Jan van, 185 Second Coming, 62, 132, 205, 206 Sefer Raziel, 172, 211 senses, 27, 28, 33, 40, 95, 101, 102, 113, 120, 121, 122, 124, 139, 141, 173, 177, 182, 193, 196, 207, 223 Serragli, Niccolosa, 85, 305 Servites, 164 Shakespeare, William King Henry VIII, 120 sibyls, 136, See Cumaean Sibyl Siena, 13, 109, 219, 221, 304, 306 San Niccolò al Carmine, 13, 217, 218 Santa Maria della Scala, 218

egh

Index

Signorelli, Luca, 127 similitudo, 10 Simone Martini, 108, 109, 219, 304 Annunciation, 108 Simplicianus, 155 Sinai, Monastery of Saint Catherine, 82 Sinigardi, Beato Benedetto, 148 Siponto, 80 Sixtus IV della Rovere, Pope, 54, 81, 305 Sixtus V Peretti, Pope, 233 Solomon, 68 Spinello Aretino, 148 Spirituals, 25 stars, 20, 38, 40, 52, 81, 86, 87, 112, 117, 119, 120, 122, 207 Stefano d’Antonio, 112 Strozzi, Filippo, 55 Suarez, Francesco, 234 Suger, Abbot, 18 Sustris, Lambert, 183 Tobias and the Angel on Their Travels, 185 Syncellus, George, 209 Tarsia, Giovanni Maria, 234, 235 Tebaldeo, Antonio, 195 Tertullian, 3 Theatines, 162 theophany, 21, 28, 83, 132 Thomas Gallus, 26, 27 Thomas of Celano, 116 Tinctoris, Johannes, 116, 131 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), 13, 74 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) Archangel Raphael and Tobias (Santa Caterina), 183 Tobias and the Angel Raphael and St. John the Baptist (San Marziale), 183 Tobias, 9, 13, 20, 103, 168, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 225, 230, 234, 298, 303, 306, 308

Tobit, 9, 13, 20, 102, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 184, 187, 190, 196, 197, 234, 301, 304, 307 Tornabuoni, Leonardo, 152, 153 Traversari, Ambrogio, 54, 138 Trent, Council of, 151, 161, 171, 188, 227, 230, 234 Trinity, 6, 20, 21, 23, 33, 34, 35, 41, 42, 63, 77, 97, 119, 127, 146, 147, 181, 187, 299 Trisagion, 7 Trithemius, Johannes, 144, 146 Tundale, 60 Umiltà of Faenza, 11, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 147 Urbino, 121 Uriel, Archangel., 171, 178, 209, See angel Valla, Lorenzo, 54 Vasari, Giorgio, 8, 13, 87, 89, 90, 123, 162, 166, 194, 198, 199, 203, 217, 218, 219, 223, 235 Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 165 Vatican. See Raphael Sistine Chapel, 13, 64, 98, 203, 223, 303 Stanza d’Eliodoro, 200 Stanza della Segnatura, 97, 197, 199 Vecchi, Giovanni de’, 225 Vellutello, Alessandro, 53, 222 Veneziano, Paolo, 66 Venice, 4, 53, 61, 63, 66, 74, 121, 178, 183, 299, 301, 307 Carmine, 183 Palazzo Ducale, 66, 74 San Marco, 61, 63, 72, 233 San Pantalon, 84 Scuola dell’Angelo Custode, 177 Vercelli Sant’Andrea, 26 Verona San Zeno, 177

323

324

efh

Index

Verrocchio, Andrea del, 9, 178, 180, 302 Baptism of Christ, 9 Vignola, Jacopo Barozzi da, 224 Virgil, 45, 47, 49, 85 Visio Baronti, 301 Vittorelli, Andrea, 234 Vivarini, Antonio (with Giovanni d’Alemagna) Coronation of the Virgin, 84 Voragine, Jacobus de, 20, 21, 80, 81, 147, 172, 221, 298

William of Auxerre, 37 William of Ockham, 9 Zanobi di Jacopo Machiavelli Coronation of the Virgin, 125 Zechariah, 204 Zohar, 142, 209, 210 Zuccari, Federico, 224, 231, 235 Zuccari, Taddeo, 224, 231, 235 Dead Christ with Angels, 224 Zwingli, Ulrich, 154