The Mentor Vol. 1 No. 40, ANGELS IN ART By JOHN C. VAN DYKE _Professor of the History of Art, Rutgers College_ [Illustration] [Illustration] THE MENTOR SERIAL No. 40 DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS MENTOR GRAVURES ANGEL WITH VIOLIN Melozzo da Forlì ANGEL CHOIR Benozzo Gozzoli ANGEL OF ANNUNCIATION Burne-Jones MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ANGELS Bellini ANGEL WITH LUTE Carpaccio SAINT MICHAEL Perugino "Paint an angel!" exclaimed Courbet (koor-bay´) the realist to a pupil who one day asked him how it should be done. "When did you ever see an angel?" The abashed pupil had to admit that he had never had the good fortune to see one. "Very well, then, you had better paint the portrait of your grandfather, whom you see every day." The advice to keep his head out of the clouds while his feet were on earth may have been needed by the pupil; but nevertheless angels have been painted time out of mind, and even such pronounced realists as Courbet and Manet (mah-nay´) have painted them. And they saw them, too; that is, they saw the pretty-faced models they turned into angels by adding enlarged pigeon wings to their shoulder blades. But they were not very spiritual angels. Realism rather scorns things spiritual, and besides religious feeling and sentiment in art passed out several centuries before the coming of the modern realists. The early men--the Fra Angelicos, the Benozzos (ben-ots-o), the Filippinos, of the fifteenth century--believed in the Biblical scenes they painted, and sometimes stated their belief in letters of gold at the bottom of their pictures. They saw things with the eye of faith,--saw Madonnas, saints, and angels in visions, and painted them, as the evangelists wrote, by the aid of inspiration. Perhaps it was their belief, their intense feeling, that gave the fine religious sentiment to the work of these early men. Yet they did not invent or discover the angel in art. It had a more material and commonplace origin than in medieval belief and religious fervor. WINGED FIGURES IN ANCIENT ART [Illustration: PERUGINO: BAPTISM OF CHRIST (detail)]