Are angels male or female?
That's not an open-ended question. Specified angels are male in all the stories of the Old and New Testaments. Their names include Gabriel and Michael. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all support the same being, and the angel is never a female. Art shows all angels as male, not androgynes, as one might first suppose by the hair styles. Sure, large groups of angels appear to include females, but when a specific angel comes down to enact a scene from scripture, he is a male. It is now just past Christmas, and whether or not you believe in angels, you see them depicted everywhere, or hear them in the Christmas carols. I trust that the gracious readers of this blog have experienced all kinds of Holiday miracles. But before we talk about having "seen" an angel, it might do us good to establish what they are. Today is Boxing day, and Art Guy is going to be busy packing away three problematic angel-types in art, tearing them wing from torso to get at the impurities in their iconography. My three examples come from, Cimabue (1240-c.1302), an anonymous 19th century ornament-maker, and Frank Capra.
The Santa Trinita Madonna, done by the innovative hand of Cimabue in about 1280, depicts a Madonna and child enthroned among saints and angels.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Cimabue_Trinita_Madonna.jpg
Click on the link. Let the art speak for a second before we start talking about them. Alright, now take a close look at the halos on the angels. What are those little hook things behind the ears? Nope, they're not symbolic of anything. They are hooks for attaching the halos to the angels' heads. Cimabue is an innovator in early Renaissance naturalism. He is painting a scene from a "Mystery Play," in which Florentine citizens would reenact the mysteries of Holy Scripture while celebrating their painted votives. Perhaps you would carry Santa Trinita's high altarpiece around during one of these celebrations. But more importantly, you would dress up like an angel, and use wire attachments to fix a halo on your head. Cimabue wanted it to be known that he was painting people dressed as angels, not angels.
I love this painting, and I love Cimabue's cutting-edge spirit. Yet he is deflating the angel's place in art. Saying "A Madonna and Saints with Angels" is more resonant as "A Madonna and Saints with People dressed like Angels," or worse yet, "A bunch of People dressed like A Madonna and Saints with Angels" was so radical that nobody, not even his highly modern pupil Giotto, carried on the tradition. We can infer a lot about the state of realism in the period. Perhaps it was important to depict Mary and Christ as worldly and connected. But a painting of an angel should be a painting of an angel, not a person dressed as an angel.
Pardon my laziness to read up on this, but I gather that somewhere in the increasing secularization of Christmas, someone decided to add Christmas trees to the fun. Growing up, I always thought stars were what kids liked to put on trees, and that angels were what sophisticated devout people put on trees. It seems that both the guiding Star and the Angel Gabriel are important for Christmas, but the angel that people put on Christmas trees is not Gabriel. In fact, it's a female angel, the likes of which are unprecedented in the Bible (I know) and in art (I think.) The angel has a lovely gown, a clearly female body, and sometimes earrings. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that women are represented in a holiday that sports two male superheros (Christ and Santa), three male magi, and eight male reindeer. But perhaps we should draw our attention more to Mary the Blessed Mother of God, bearer of the Church, Queen of Heaven. She is decidedly female. The angel Gabriel is male, as one might notice in all the intriguing Annunciation scenes from Simone Martini to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Christmas Tree angel often looks like Barbie.
Now comes one of the most "innovative" angels I have ever witnessed. The problem with this angel is he establishes a unique set of iconography for the hordes of typical Christian family film-watchers (including me) that spent their childhood watching him. This angel is hard to replace with the proper iconography. This is the angel Clarence from Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life."
The angels in this movie are galaxies. No more is explained about their cosmic environment except that they appear as galaxies in outer space, and they blink while talking to each other. While they talk, a chime-like rendering of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" plays incessently in this 'heaven.' An angel in Capra's film has two stages of professionality. There is the younger wingless angel, who must graduate in the eyes of higher angels before he can get his wings. When he gets his wings, he can fly, see the past narrative of a person's life without any help from higher angels, and the galaxy that he is presumably grows in size. When the wingless angel graduates to winged angel, a bell rings on Earth.
??? Galaxies? Bells? Wings and no wings? Clarence is one of these strange creatures, and is further described a "Guardian Angel," a Christian tradition, but not a Catholic one. What he does for the beloved George Bailey is really a Christmas miracle, but believer or non-believer, I would be puzzled if I was in George's place. If Art Guy's guardian angel ever came down and said, "You'll never make any money doing this; go to medical school," I would be highly suspicious if he was reading Tom Sawyer, drinking mulled wine, and making excuses for his lack of wings.
My favorite paintings depicting angels are Giotto's "Lamentation" in the Arena Chapel, Botticelli's "Annunciation," Simone Martini's "Annunciation," and Rossetti's "Annunciation," an "Expulsion from the Garden" by Masaccio and the same scene depicted in the Florence Baptistery Ceiling. I also admit that Cimabue's "Santa Trinita Madonna" is beautifully life-like for the time and I can easily overlook the wire attachments to appreciate one of the prettiest altar-pieces in Florence.
I would love to hear if you think you've seen an angel, whether or not it corrosponds to precedented iconography. An angel can obviously be anything you want it to be.
