The image of angels | 2

 In addition, in the Roman pre-Christian tradition, there were suitable iconographic prototypes, for example, the image of the winged goddess of victory Nike, dressed in ashes. She regularly appeared on the reverse of gold coins between portraits of Roman or early Byzantine co-throne emperors with crowns and halos - for example, between Valens and Valentinian I. These images served as the basis for the first Christian images of saints, and then the Trinity.

 For example, on one gold bottom, Christ crowns the apostles Peter and Paul. This scene is exactly copied from the coin, where the goddess Nika takes the place of the Savior. With Roman money, the image of the royal trinity with a central winged character, in turn, could have come from ancient Egyptian art, where in the same manner as early as the 2nd century BC. e. on stone gems Bait (one of the incarnations of Horus), Hathor (the patroness of motherhood) and Akori (the goddess of power of the pharaoh) were depicted.

 Gradually, the image of winged creatures, copied from the goddess Nike and genetically ascending to the iconography of Roman coins and ancient Egyptian gems, became standard for Christian culture.

 In the 5th century, there are still unusual works of art in which old and new canons are mixed. For example, in an Italian ivory panel in the British Museum in London, we see a heavenly messenger in a toga with wings, a thick beard and mustache blessing the baptism of Jesus. However, in the future, angels will never look so courageous.

 Perhaps, among other things, this is due to the fact that viewers of the 4th-5th centuries understood that such an image has a syncretic nature and goes back both to the descriptions of the biblical "men" and to the image of the pagan goddess. The heavenly messengers now had a kind of gender neutrality, reinforced by Scripture (Luke 20: 27–36) and the authority of theologians: Jerome of Stridons, for example, argued that God and angels cannot have gender.

 Wheel and Beasthead Monster: Chimera Angel

 Perhaps the only place in the Bible where angels are described in more or less detail is the vision of Ezekiel. At first, the prophet does not indicate what kind of creatures he saw, and speaks of strange creatures with four heads - a calf, a man, an eagle and a lion:

 “... their appearance was like that of a man; and each has four faces, and each of them has four wings; and their feet were straight legs, and the soles of their feet were like the foot of a calf's foot, and shone like shiny brass. And the hands of men were under their wings on their four sides; and their faces and their wings, all four; their wings touched one another; during their march they did not turn around, but walked each in the direction of their face. The likeness of their faces is the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side of all four of them; and on the left side all four had the face of a calf, and all four had the face of an eagle. <...> And I looked at the animals, and behold, on the ground next to these animals, one wheel in front of their four faces. <…> When they walked, they walked on their four sides; did not turn around during the procession. And their rims - they were high and terrible; all four had their rims full of eyes around them ”(Ezek. 1: 5-18).

 And only in Chapter X will it be said that this is one of the angelic orders - cherubs:

 “And the cherubim lifted up their wings, and were lifted up in my eyes from the earth; when they left, the wheels were beside them; And they stood at the entrance to the eastern gate of the House of the Lord, and the glory of the God of Israel is above them. These were the same animals that I saw at the foot of the God of Israel by the river Chebar. And I knew that they were Cherubim ”(Ezek. 10: 19–20).

 Already in the early Middle Ages, church artists tried to depict the angels described by the prophet as close as possible to the text. The four-shaped creatures began to be called tetramorphs - and they were considered a special kind of cherubim that surround the Lord's throne. Because Ezekiel's "verbal portrait" was extremely confusing and difficult to visualize, Christian masters over the centuries painted them in many different ways.

 For this reason, images of creatures with the heads of a man, a bull, a lion and an eagle are often found on the pages of medieval Bibles. In their bodies, the legs are adjacent to paws or wheels, studded with eyes, and their arms - with wings.

 Sometimes we see not a single "organism", but wings fitted to each other, to which - with more or less anatomical persuasiveness - four heads are attached, as well as wheels that turn the tetramorph into the carriage of the Lord. This is how the angel is depicted in the earliest extant images of this kind from the Syrian Gospel of Rabula 586.