‘The Chastisement of Heliodorus’ has given occasion to the sublimest composition in which human genius ever attempted to embody the conception of the supernatural—Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican. St. Michael, the protecting angel of the Hebrew nation, is supposed to have been the minister of divine wrath on this occasion; but Raphael, in omitting the wings, and all exaggeration or alteration of the human figure, has shown how unnecessary it was for _him_ to have recourse to the prodigious and impossible in form, in order to give the supernatural in sentiment. The unearthly warrior and his unearthly steed—the weapon in his hand, which is not a sword to pierce, nor a club to strike, but a sort of mace, of which, as it seems, a touch would annihilate; the two attendant spirits, who come gliding above the marble floor, with their hair streaming back with the rapidity of their aërial motion—are in the very spirit of Dante, and, as conceptions of superhuman power, superior to anything in pictured form which Art has bequeathed to us. In calling to mind the various representations of the angels of the Apocalypse let loose for destruction, one is tempted to exclaim, ‘O for a warning voice!’ When the Muse of Milton quailed, and fell ten thousand fathom deep into Bathos, what could be expected from human invention? In general, where this subject is attempted in pictures, we find the angels animated, like those of Milton in the war of heaven, with ‘fierce desire of battle,’ breathing vengeance, wrath, and fury. So Albert Dürer, in those wonderful scenes of his ‘Apocalypse,’ has exhibited them; but some of the early Italians show them merely impassive, conquering almost without effort, punishing without anger. The immediate instruments of the wrath of God in the day of judgment are not angels, but devils or demons, generally represented by the old painters with every possible exaggeration of hideousness, and as taking a horrible and grotesque delight in their task. The demons are fallen angels, their deformity a consequence of their fall. Thus, in some very ancient representations of the expulsion of Lucifer and his rebel host, the degradation of the form increases with their distance from heaven.[37] Those who are uppermost are still angels; they bear the aureole, the wings, and the tunic; they have not yet lost all their original brightness: those below them begin to assume the bestial form: the fingers become talons, the heads become horned; and at last, as they touch the confines of the gulf of hell, the transformation is seen complete, from the luminous angel into the abominable and monstrous devil, with serpent tail, claws, bristles, and tusks. This gradual transformation, as they descend into the gulf of sin, has a striking allegorical significance which cannot escape the reader. In a Greek MS. of the ninth century,[38] bearing singular traces of antique classical art in the conception and attributes of the figures,