Touched By Angels

Personally, I don’t believe in angels. (Sorry about that, Roma and Della.) Belief in the existence of supernatural winged messengers from God isn’t necessary, though, to thorough enjoyment of the newly opened exhibition “The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican.” It’s enough that the artists who made these 97 disparate works of art believed. Their conviction provided the scaffold on which their art was built.

The show, which opened a national tour Wednesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, is a sequel (of sorts) to “The Vatican Collects: The Papacy and Art,” which generated mountains of publicity when it traveled the United States in 1983--and molehills of critical enthusiasm. Presented under the auspices of Pope John Paul II, it was the first large-scale loan show ever sent abroad by the church in Rome, one of the most powerful and significant patrons and collectors in the history of Western art.

John Paul II has been affectionately called “the traveling pope,” given a peripatetic tenure that reflects his activist desire to tend to the faithful wherever they may be, rather than waiting for the flock to find the shepherd. The unprecedented 1983 show plainly meant to function as his symbolic goodwill emissary.

Despite the effort, lots of grumbling was heard when Los Angeles, home of perhaps the largest Catholic population in the country, was by-passed in favor of San Francisco on the show’s itinerary. This time things are different: The City of Angels is hosting the debut of the Vatican’s angels show.

A second difference is even more noteworthy: The 1983 show turned out to be not very good, while this one is provocative and absorbing.

The failure of the first show was perhaps inevitable, given its desire to chronicle the history of papal patronage. Artistically, the popes have done well in two areas: collecting classical antiquities, which they did skillfully in the 18th and early 19th century; and commissioning architecture and architecturally related art, such as frescoes and room decorations. Antiquities could only account for one small portion of the show, while sending the Sistine Chapel on tour proved problematic. You left the 1983 exhibition wondering, “Is that all there is?,” since most of what was major in papal patronage had necessarily been left behind.

By contrast, the success of “Angels From the Vatican” stems from the savvy approach to its subject. The show puts art to use as an incomparable repository of shifting cultural values, tracing the origins, transformations, eventual ubiquity and--by default, through an absence of convincing Modern art--final near-disappearance of angels as images in Western art.

The story this show tells is not a tale of masterpieces. (If angel masterpieces is what you crave, visit Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum of Art instead and ogle Jacopo Bassano’s “Flight Into Egypt,” circa 1540, starring one of the greatest painted-angels ever.) The relative dearth of primary masterworks even serves a useful purpose: It underscores how routine the subject once was.

Which is not to say that extraordinary objects won’t be encountered here. From an ancient Assyrian carved relief of a winged genius to small, gorgeous panel paintings of Christian subjects by the likes of Masolino, Fra Angelico, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Raphael and others, there’s a lot with which to be satisfied.

The most captivating galleries feature ancient Assyrian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman sculptures, vase paintings and decorated household objects. The idea of winged figures as intermediaries between the mundane and the divine predates Christianity by centuries, and these ancient works lay out a fascinating repertoire of motifs that probably morphed into later Christian iconography.

Giving a person wings was a handy way to signify his job as a messenger (think Mercury, the Roman messenger of the gods, with his winged hat and feet.) In the show, a lovely, life-size, 2nd century AD Roman marble of Eros (or Cupid), modeled after a Greek bronze by the incomparable Lysippus, shows the beautifully idealized boy testing the resilience of his bow. As the child of Aphrodite he’s a messenger of love--and a perfect prototype for subsequent Christian motifs, where angels perform as innocent winged-messengers of God’s love.

Nearby, a peculiar Roman statue of a Nike (or Winged Victory) holds a wreath, which might suggest it was used in a funerary monument. If so, it’s not a big leap to the subsequent Christian idea of an angel as a winged symbol of victory over death. And this Nike is thought to be from the early 4th century A.D., a period of rapid Christianization.

The transformation of pre-Christian winged figures into biblical angels is provocatively surveyed. Then, the show goes fast-forward about a thousand years, arriving at the first of what turns out to be the most consistently beautiful works in the show: gold-ground icons, from 14th century Italy to 17th century Russia, which portray all manner of biblical episodes and events with angels in attendance.

Typical is an early 14th-century panel, dismembered from a larger altarpiece, that shows a protective angel accompanying St. John the Baptist as a child. The shallow, theatrical, richly decorative spaces in gold-ground panels, where figures are deployed to tell stories rather than live in the world, is conducive to a proliferation of ethereal iconography about supernatural beings. The space of imagination creates room.

So does the deep, theatrical, richly illusionistic space of Renaissance and Baroque painting, but in a different way. As devotional images, the gold ground panels are meant to function rather like angels themselves, in a mystical, intermediary space between heaven and earth. Illusionism, on the other hand, emphasizes the audience as the object of address. You’re meant to be persuaded.

To see how, check out the sleeper in the show: a wildly eccentric Pieta in the very last gallery, painted by Ludovico Carracci on the opening cusp of the Baroque era. Its tangled knot of figures all smashed forward to the picture’s frontal plane, with Christ’s wilted corpse sprawled across the lap of God, rather than the Virgin Mary, is encircled by a crush of angels clutching symbols of the Passion.

The condition of belief having been eroded in our time by the seemingly pervasive modern qualities of skepticism and critical doubt, it’s impossible to imagine a picture quite like this being made today. The mostly paltry Modern works in the show speak of an era after Courbet, the 19th century Realist who famously threw down the gauntlet by declaring, “Show me an angel and I will paint it!”

Rosalio Jose Cardinal Castillo Lara, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, expresses in the accompanying catalog his certainty that the focus of this show will be “especially appreciated in the United States, where there has been an increasing interest in the subject.” In the end, though, it isn’t the proliferation of angels that makes the show timely and instructive; it’s the power of belief as an artistic engine that resonates.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7020, through April 12. Closed Mondays.