‘Angels From the Vatican’ Made Visible in Westwood

What is an angel? The folks at the Vatican ought to know.

But to stimulate enlightened discussion of a major traveling exhibition, that question greets visitors in the introductory gallery of “The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican.”

Opening Wednesday at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, the show presents about 100 paintings, sculptures, tapestries and liturgical objects from Vatican collections

The answer to the rhetorical question--as seen in the exhibition--depends upon the artists and their milieus. In “Concert of Angels,” an oil sketch for a fresco depicting paradise, Baciccia, a 17th century Italian painter, portrayed angels as weightless, golden-haired beings who ride through the heavens on puffy clouds while singing and plucking harps in praise of the lord.

Taking a more somber approach, a 15th century painting of the annunciation by Siennese master Giovanni di Paolo presents the Archangel Gabriel as a businesslike winged messenger whose feet are firmly planted on the ground. In another annunciation, created around 1425 in the workshop of Gentile da Fabriano, the female angel who tells the Virgin Mary she will give birth to Jesus is richly dressed in red and gold, but wilts into a deferential pose and lowers her eyes.

Then there are the fallen angels--portrayed as Satan with bats’ wings and pointed ears in an 18th century painting attributed to the circle of Corrado Giaquinto, and as a tortured abstraction in a modern painting by Marino Marini.

As the exhibition demonstrates, there is little artistic agreement as to how angels should look--except that they generally have wings. But the show also makes the point that angels--or their pre-Christian equivalents--have been a subject of art for thousands of years. What’s more, they seem to be growing more popular with every passing day.

“This exhibition has focused my attention on the enormous diversity of so-called angel products,” said Father Allen Duston, who represents the Pontifical Commission to the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, a support group that initiated the show. “If you go to Barnes & Noble, you will find a whole section of angels. Video stores have angel sections too. There are, in fact, stores that sell nothing but angels. It’s an incredible social phenomenon.”

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Duston has formulated a few theories about what makes angels perpetually fascinating while helping to organize the show.

“From a purely visual standpoint, angels have always been attractive because they come out of the sky--except for fallen angels that come out of the earth--and they are full of light and life,” he said.

“They tend to be nonconfrontational figures, generally representing goodness, and that can be seen as they interact with humanity, but also as they come from the godhead. They also bridge the gap between what we can see and what we cannot see or what we are aiming toward.

“But I think the current interest in angels in the United States is stirred up a bit by musings about the millennium,” Duston said. “If you look at history of the last 2,000 years, as you get to the year 500 or 1000 or 1500, there is a certain emphasis in popular piety and imagery that has to do with this perhaps cataclysmic time to come.”

The exhibition theme was chosen partly because of angels’ widespread appeal, but also because a survey of angels offered an opportunity to display the vastness of the Vatican collections over a broad span of time, Duston said. Works on view have been drawn from the Vatican Museums and other Vatican properties in Rome, including the pope’s private apartment.

The show traces artistic representations of angels from a Neo-Assyrian “Winged Genius” carved in stone during the 9th century BC, to Salvador Dali’s surreal “Angelic Landscape,” painted in 1977. The majority of works come from Byzantine, Renaissance and Baroque periods, including pieces by Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio, Guido Reni, Guercino, Veronese and other major figures.

Presented in thematic sections, the show leads from the introductory gallery to “Origins of Angel Iconography,” exemplified by Greek, Roman and Etruscan art. The following galleries explore the role of angels in the lives of Christ, the Virgin and the community, where they function as messengers, saints, guardians and consolers. Next comes the “Angels and the Liturgy” section, which includes part of an altarpiece by Italian Renaissance master Raphael depicting three figures that personify the virtue of faith. Galleries devoted to “Christ the Judge” and “The Holy Trinity” wind up the show.

“The Invisible Made Visible”--which will appear at the St. Louis Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla.--is only the second major traveling exhibition of works from Vatican collections, Duston said. The first, a broad survey, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1982-83. The patrons group, principally composed of Americans, was established following that exhibition to provide funds for conservation and preservation of the collections, he said.

The patrons paid for restoration of objects in the current exhibition. But there’s no end of work to be done by the Vatican Museums’ conservation staff, so the patrons want to expand their 600-member group. And Duston isn’t shy about that part of the show’s agenda. “Getting new patrons is certainly one of the objectives,” he said.

* “The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican,” UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Hours: Tue.-Sun., 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thur., 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Dates: Feb. 4-April 12. Admission: $4.50, adults; $3, seniors and students, free under 17. Advanced tickets available through Ticketmaster (213) 480-3232 and UCLA Central Ticket Office (310) 825-2101. Information: (310) 443-7000.