The image of angels | 1

 Beard, bald head and wheel with eyes: how the image of angels changed from Antiquity to the present day

 Until the 4th century, angels were depicted as bearded or bald men, and it never occurred to anyone to draw them with wings - but then the heavenly messengers suddenly became winged and in halos. In the Middle Ages, angels were sometimes presented as creatures in the form of wheels, consisting of only wings and eyes, and sometimes cherubs grew four animal heads. Historian Sergei Zotov, author of the book "History of Alchemy" and co-author of the bestseller "The Suffering Middle Ages", tells about the evolution of the iconography of angels from Antiquity to the present.

 The modern image of an angel in the mass consciousness is a young man in a white tunic and a thin golden halo with huge bird wings. However, artists did not immediately begin to draw the heavenly messengers just like that. Although they are mentioned 273 times in the Bible, all descriptions of seraphim and cherubim are fragmentary and do not contain detailed instructions on how to portray them. The Greek “angelos” - “messenger” - rather indicates the function of these creatures, who are also more often called simply “men”.

 The lack of detailed portrait characteristics has given rise to many interpretations of the image. So there were balding and wingless male angels, effeminate or asexual winged creatures, zoomorphic four-headed, four-legged and four-winged chimeras and non-anthropomorphic wheels with eyes.

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 Beard and bald head: angel man

 In one of the psalms, angels are described as being made of fire and wind. In Daniel's vision, these creatures are able to move through the air: "The man Gabriel ... having quickly flown in, touched me about the time of the evening sacrifice" (Dan. 9:21). The Gospel of Matthew adds that the angel "looks like lightning" and his clothes are "white as snow" (Matthew 28: 3). In general, these are the most detailed descriptions of the appearance of heavenly messengers.

 On early Christian frescoes and marble sarcophagi, angels, for lack of detailed information about their appearance, looked exactly like people. The first such images appear in the second half of the 3rd century on the walls in the Roman catacombs. Angels cannot be distinguished from ordinary people if you do not know the plot. For example, in Priscilla's dungeon, Gabriel, bringing the good news to the Virgin Mary, looks like a man with short hair in a white dress. The three angels in the scene of Abraham's hospitality in the catacombs on Via Latina are ordinary young men who do not stand out from the rest of the characters in the frescoes.

 All the same male images we see in the biblical episodes depicted on sarcophagi. Sometimes one of them is even bearded or bald, like an angel on a 4th century tomb from the Pio Cristiano Museum in the Vatican, who stops the hand of Abraham, who sacrifices his son to God. Apparently, this is how the artists wanted to show that the messengers of heaven could come to earth and talk to people, which means that they had to look anthropomorphic so that people would not be afraid of them.

 Flight and androgyny: the winged angel

 By the end of the 4th century, it became important for artists to distinguish angels from people, and therefore, a need arose for special visual markers. Since the Bible only mentioned in passing that the heavenly messengers are capable of flying, theologians began to pay close attention to this detail already in the 2nd-3rd centuries.

 Tertullian wrote that both angels and demons are winged. John Chrysostom at the end of the 4th century claimed that the wings allow God's messengers to quickly descend from heaven to help people, although they do not belong to their immaterial nature. The appearance of the angels was identified with the appearance of the Holy Spirit, which the Lord also repeatedly sent as a winged herald to earth.

 At some point, these two images in the view of theologians merged so much that in the scene of the heavenly intercession of the Archangel Michael for three youths, a dove is depicted in a cave of fire, and not an anthropomorphic creature. In their appearance, the angels acquired more and more similarity with God and "moved away" from man.

 But over time, the ranks of admirers of heavenly messengers are expanding, and the theologian Novatian writes that Christ Himself belonged to the latter.

 At the Laodicean Council held in the middle of the 4th century, it was decided to ban the cult of angels as idolatry, and to punish Novatian for his heresy.

 Now the artists were faced with a difficult task - not only to highlight the messengers of heaven among people, but also to show their difference from God, who wore a halo and surrounded by a shining mandorla, and from Christ, embodied on earth in the image of a man. The solution, however, was quickly found - to give the heavenly messengers wings, thereby emphasizing their function, as well as the position between the Lord and people, between heaven and earth. Thus, it was possible to fulfill the instructions of the Laodicean Council, and to reveal the syncretic nature of these creatures, almost not described in the Bible.