Angels also receive in golden cups the blood which flows from the wounds of our Saviour. This is a representation which has the authority of some of the most distinguished and most spiritual among the old painters, but it is to my taste particularly unpleasing and unpoetical. Raphael, in an early picture, the only crucifixion he ever painted, thus introduces the angels; and this form of the angelic ministry is a mystical version of the sacrifice of the Redeemer not uncommon in Italian and German pictures of the sixteenth century. As the scriptural and legendary scenes in which angels form the poetical machinery will be discussed hereafter in detail as separate subjects, I shall conclude these general and preliminary remarks with a few words on the characteristic style in which the principal painters have set forth the angelic forms and attributes. It appears that, previous to the end of the fourth century, there were religious scruples which forbade the representation of angels, arising perhaps from the scandal caused in the early Church by the worship paid to these supernatural beings, and so strongly opposed by the primitive teachers. We do not find on any of the Christian relics of the first three centuries, neither in the catacombs, nor on the vases or the sarcophagi, any figure which could be supposed to represent what we call an angel. On one of the latest sarcophagi we find little winged figures, but evidently the classical winged genii, used in the classical manner as ornament only.[47] In the second council of Nice, John of Thessalonica maintained that angels have the human form, and may be so represented; and the Jewish doctors had previously decided that God consulted his angels when He said, ‘Let us make man after _our_ image,’ and that consequently we may suppose the angels to be like men, or, in the words of the prophet, ‘like unto the similitude of the sons of men.’[48] (Dan. x. 16.) But it is evident that, in the first attempt at angelic effigy, it was deemed necessary, in giving the human shape, to render it as superhuman, as imposing, as possible: colossal proportions, mighty overshadowing wings, kingly attributes, these we find in the earliest figures of angels which I believe exist—the mosaics in the church of Santa Agata at Ravenna (A.D. 400). Christ is seated on a throne (as in the early sarcophagi): he holds the Gospel in one hand, and with the left gives the benediction. An angel stands on each side: they have large wings, and bear a silver wand, the long sceptre of the Grecian kings; they are robed in classical drapery, but wear the short pallium (the ‘garb succinct for flight’); their feet are sandaled, as prepared for a journey, and their hair bound by a fillet. Except in the wings and short pallium, they resemble the figures of Grecian kings and priests in the ancient bas-reliefs.