In truth, the Middle Ages were the time of the angels. Can we blame them for allowing themselves to be flattered by this concerted attention? For being more and more often in the proximity of human beings, even when they had no specific business to perform there? They still radiated dignity with their stern looks, simple robes, and angular movements; their beauty still had something hard and cruel about it, not of savagery, but the opposite, of an inhuman restraint, which, however, deserted them when they sang — the song of angels, oh, how lovely it was! — then their features would soften, their cheeks flush, their eyes fill with tears. But it couldn’t last. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their sojourns with mankind got ever longer and more frequent, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century the first changes in the angels’ physiognomy occurred. A painting by Francesco Botticini of that period clearly shows what has happened. Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, three of the archangels, are walking in a landscape, presumably Italian, in the company of a young boy. True to tradition, Michael is clad in armor, in his hand he holds a raised sword, and yet there is nothing mighty or awesome about him, rather the contrary: his face is soft and boyish, his cheeks a trifle fat, his hair long and well-groomed, and he has chosen red shoes to go with his black armor, a matching gold-embroidered red cape and a red scabbard with a gilded point, giving the impression of a vain young nobleman rather than a victorious warrior with all the angels of heaven under his command. Certainly his gaze has retained something of its former ruthlessness, but with the rest of the figure appearing so mannered and self-obsessed, he has more of the arrogant aspect of the spoiled youth about him. Raphael’s costume is violet, across his shoulders he has a gold-embroidered cape of red, fastened at his throat with a simple pearl, draped in such a way as to show the subdued green of the lining visible over his arms. Around his waist he has tied a red and black kerchief, also embroidered in gold, while his wings are decorated with green and black circles, not unlike the pattern of a peacock feather. His hips are broad, his posture feminine, his hair long and golden, his face beautiful as a lovely woman’s. His small mouth is pursed, the expression filling his half-closed eyes is one of boredom and distaste. Gabriel’s figure is also dressed in a dark green silk cloak, with a black, gold-embroidered collar, his wings are red in color, and his face is turned to the viewer in an attitude that might have been challenging, had it not been for the almost demonstrative lack of interest in its expression. He knows he is being observed, he knows that he looks good, but is indifferent to it all. At the same time there is also sorrow in his eyes. It makes his expression enigmatic. Why is he looking at us like that? He must want something of us.
But what?
In the early Renaissance, angels began to be portrayed with expressions similar to this, all expressing compassion for man, as if they were only then close enough to comprehend what they saw. But Gabriel’s expression is different, it’s introverted: it isn’t us he’s suffering with, but the angels. He alone has a notion where the path they’re following will lead. The angels are to be pitied, he seems to be saying as they pass us. But the clearest sign that something is wrong can be seen in their halos. Whereas in Cimabue and Giotto’s time they shone so brightly that now and then they seemed like discs of gold, here they are so pale that they can be glimpsed only against a dark background, like Gabriel’s red wings. Against the sky they are transparent. These angels are fallen, but they fall so slowly that they notice nothing themselves.
The fact that it would be another hundred years before these changes began to affect the angels’ lives, bearing, and behavior must mean either that they remained blind in relation to their fate, something that’s hardly plausible considering the length of time involved, or that they simply hadn’t faced up to the consequences of it before, but lived in the hope that this new condition would pass, rather like the way some people shut their eyes to the most serious symptoms imaginable and don’t visit the doctor until the disease has got such a grip that it’s no longer possible to keep the truth hidden, not even from themselves. After becoming an ever-more-common sight in the purlieus of certain Italian city-states during the fifteenth century, the angels slowly began to draw back during the first half of the sixteenth century, presumably in an attempt to resurrect the old order in which an angel’s appearance was as unique and rare an event as it was awe-inspiring and important, but this was unsuccessful, as man’s intimacy with them had become too great. Whether through arrogance or simply a lack of vigilance, they had gone too far. In certain places angels had become such a common sight that even the aura of revelation, the icy fear and ecstatic joy the sight of them had always generated, was gradually diminished. Fathers pointed them out to their children, farmers took them for good auguries, country priests were flattered when they manifested themselves in their churches. It was as if they’d always been there. Even the glow of their fires on the mountainsides outside the towns at night, which at first had caused people such disquiet, particularly as they’d been told that large flocks of angels sat on the ground all night long completely immobile, just staring into the flames, as if they were hypnotized or the living dead, had gradually come to mean the opposite; over the generations a belief had grown up that the angels were just watching over their town. The fact that this intimacy is reflected in only a few sources isn’t at all strange, because human nature takes note of the unusual rather than the commonplace, the exception rather than the rule. They had as little cause to remark on the angels’ roamings across the countryside when they wrote to each other as they had to mention the flight of the birds across the sky. Apart from art, of course, where angels continued to be painted and feted. But even here their supernatural aura waned; they began, more and more, to be seen as beautiful in themselves, in just the same way as an animal or a flower or a landscape is beautiful.