Angels

[poliphilo]

"What sex is an angel?" asks pondhopper. Well, neither, obviously. An angel is a spirit and spirits are genderless. For the purpose of communicating with humankind they may assume a gender- or allow us to impose one on them- but in their own element they're neither one thing nor the other.

I went looking for pictures of angels. Most artists get it. Most pictures of angels- from medieval wall paintings to renaissance altarpieces to Russian icons- have angels who are superbly androgyne. Only in the 20th century- with the tradition broken and artists all at sea- do you get the odd, obviously gendered angel- either curvaceously feminine, or rippingly male. I don't like these gendered angels. They're wrong. There are things higher and holier than sex- and angels, dropping down into this lower realm to the sound of rebecks and viols, remind us of this. Their beauty- as the best artists have laboured to realise- is a beauty of the beyond. 



The Archangel Michael: Rogier Van Der Weyden.

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....another interesting bit of research. I'll have to check into the baby angel timeline. You're probably right. If they were the spirits of departed infants, in the Catholic Church they would have been baptized departed infants since until recently (last year!) the unbaptized departed babies did not go to heaven.

I'm quite fond of late medieval Flemish painting, too.