Volume 2, Part 1 Part 3 (1/2)
Theology by Ewald, Schultz, Smend, Kayser-Marti, &c.; and of N.T. Theology by Weiss, and in van Oosterzee's _Dogmatics_. Also commentaries on special pa.s.sages, especially Driver and Bevan on _Daniel_, and G.A. Smith, _Minor Prophets_, ii. 310 ff.; and articles _s.v._ ”Angel” in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_, and the _Encyclopaedia Biblica_.
(W.H. BE.)
ANGEL, a gold coin, first used in France (_angelot, ange_) in 1340, and introduced into England by Edward IV. in 1465 as a new issue of the ”n.o.ble,” and so at first called the ”angel-n.o.ble.” It varied in value between that period and the time of Charles I. (when it was last coined) from 6s. 8d. to 10s. The name was derived from the representation it bore of St. Michael and the dragon. The angel was the coin given to those who came to be touched for the disease known as king's evil; after it was no longer coined, medals, called touch-pieces, with the same device, were given instead.
ANGELICA, a genus of plants of the natural order _Umbelliferae_, represented in Britain by one species, _A. sylvestris_, a tall perennial herb with large bipinnate leaves and large compound umbels of white or purple flowers. The name Angelica is popularly given to a plant of an allied genus, _Archangelica officinalis_, the tender shoots of which are used in making certain kinds of aromatic sweetmeats. _Angelica balsam_ is obtained by extracting the roots with alcohol, evaporating and extracting the residue with ether. It is of a dark brown colour and contains angelica oil, angelica wax and angelicin, C_{18}_H_{30}_O. The essential oil of the roots of _Angelica archangelica_ contains -terebangelene, C_{10}_H_{16}, and other terpenes; the oil of the seeds also contains -terebangelene, together with methylethylacetic acid and hydroxymyristic acid.
The angelica tree is a member of the order _Avaliaceae_, a species of _Aralia (A. spinosa_), a native of North America; it grows 8 to 12 ft.
high, has a simple p.r.i.c.kle-bearing stem forming an umbrella-like head, and much divided leaves.
ANGELICO, FRA (1387-1455), Italian painter. Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole is the name given to a far-famed painter-friar of the Florentine state in the 15th century, the representative, beyond all other men, of pietistic painting. He is often, but not accurately, termed simply ”Fiesole,” which is merely the name of the town where he first took the vows; more often Fra Angelico. If we turn his compound designation into English, it runs thus--”the Beatified Friar John the Angelic of Fiesole.” In his lifetime he was known no doubt simply as Fra Giovanni or Friar John; ”The Angelic” is a laudatory term which was a.s.signed to him at an early date,--we find it in use within thirty years after his death; and, at some period which is not defined in our authorities, he was beatified by due ecclesiastical process. His baptismal name was Guido, Giovanni being only his name in religion. He was born at Vicchio, in the Tuscan province of Mugello, of unknown but seemingly well-to-do parentage, in 1387 (not 1390 as sometimes stated); in 1407 he became a novice in the convent of S. Domenico at Fiesole, and in 1408 he took the vows and entered the Dominican order.
Whether he had previously been a painter by profession is not certain, but may be p.r.o.nounced probable. The painter named Lorenzo Monaco may have contributed to his art-training, and the influence of the Sienese school is discernible in his work.
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According to Vasari, the first paintings of this artist were in the Certosa of Florence; none such exist there now. His earliest extant performances, in considerable number, are at Cortona, whither he was sent during his novitiate, and here apparently he spent all the opening years of his monastic life. His first works executed in fresco were probably those, now destroyed, which he painted in the convent of S. Domenico in this city; as a fresco-painter, he may have worked under, or as a follower of, Gherardo Starnina. From 1418 to 1436 he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred to the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, and in 1438 undertook to paint the altarpiece for the choir, followed by many other works; he may have studied about this time the renowned frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the Florentine church of the Carmine and also the paintings of Orcagna. In or about 1445 he was invited by the pope to Rome. The pope who reigned from 1431 to 1447 was Eugenius IV., and he it was who in 1445 appointed another Dominican friar, a colleague of Angelico, to be archbishop of Florence. If the story (first told by Vasari) is true--that this appointment was made at the suggestion of Angelico only after the archbishopric had been offered to himself, and by him declined on the ground of his inapt.i.tude for so elevated and responsible a station--Eugenius, and not (as stated by Vasari) his successor Nicholas V., must have been the pope who sent the invitation and made the offer to Fra Giovanni, for Nicholas only succeeded in 1447. The whole statement lacks authentication, though in itself credible enough. Certain it is that Angelico was staying in Rome in the first half of 1447; and he painted in the Vatican the Cappella del Sacramento, which was afterwards demolished by Paul III. In June 1447 he proceeded to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the cathedral, with the co-operation of his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli. He afterwards returned to Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V. In this capital he died in 1455, and he lies buried in the church of the Minerva.
According to all the accounts which have reached us, few men on whom the distinction of beatification has been conferred could have deserved it more n.o.bly than Fra Giovanni. He led a holy and self-denying life, shunning all advancement, and was a brother to the poor; no man ever saw him angered. He painted with unceasing diligence, treating none but sacred subjects; he never retouched or altered his work, probably with a religious feeling that such as divine providence allowed the thing to come, such it should remain. He was wont to say that he who ill.u.s.trates the acts of Christ should be with Christ. It is averred that he never handled a brush without fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a Crucifixion. The Last Judgment and the Annunciation were two of the subjects he most frequently treated.
Bearing in mind the details already given as to the dates of Fra Giovanni's sojournings in various localities, the reader will be able to trace approximately the sequence of the works which we now proceed to name as among his most important productions. In Florence, in the convent of S. Marco (now converted into a national museum), a series of frescoes, beginning towards 1443; in the first cloister is the Crucifixion with St. Dominic kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on a wall near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third Crucifixion, with the Virgin swooning, a composition of twenty life-sized figures--the red background, which has a strange and harsh effect, is the misdoing of some restorer; an ”Annunciation,” the figures of about three-fourths of life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining pa.s.sage, the ”Virgin enthroned,” with four saints; on the wall of a cell, the ”Coronation of the Virgin,” with Saints Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Benedict, Dominic, Francis and Peter Martyr; two Dominicans welcoming Jesus, habited as a pilgrim; an ”Adoration of the Magi”; the ”Marys at the Sepulchre.” All these works are later than the altarpiece which Angelico painted (as before mentioned) for the choir connected with this convent, and which is now in the academy of Florence; it represents the Virgin with Saints Cosmas and Damian (the patrons of the Medici family), Dominic, Peter, Francis, Mark, John Evangelist and Stephen; the pediment ill.u.s.trated the lives of Cosmas and Damian, but it has long been severed from the main subject. In the Uffizi gallery, an altarpiece, the Virgin (life-sized) enthroned, with the Infant and twelve angels. In S. Domenico, Fiesole, a few frescoes, less fine than those in S. Marco; also an altarpiece in tempera of the Virgin and Child between Saints Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Dominic and Peter Martyr, now much destroyed. The subject which originally formed the predella of this picture has, since 1860, been in the National Gallery, London, and worthily represents there the hand of the saintly painter. The subject is a Glory, Christ with the banner of the Resurrection, and a mult.i.tude of saints, including, at the extremities, the saints or beati of the Dominican order; here are no fewer than 266 figures or portions of figures, many of them having names inscribed. This predella was highly lauded by Vasari; still more highly another picture which used to form an altarpiece in Fiesole, and which now obtains world-wide celebrity in the Louvre--the ”Coronation of the Virgin,” with eight predella subjects of the miracles of St. Dominic.
For the church of Santa Trinita, Florence, Angelico executed a ”Deposition from the Cross,” and for the church of the Angeli, a ”Last Judgment,” both now in the Florentine academy; for S. Maria Novella, a ”Coronation of the Virgin,” with a predella in three sections, now in the Uffizi,--this again is one of his masterpieces. In Orvieto cathedral he painted three triangular divisions of the ceiling, portraying respectively Christ in a glory of angels, sixteen saints and prophets, and the virgin and apostles: all these are now much repainted and damaged. In Rome, in the Chapel of Nicholas V., the acts of Saints Stephen and Lawrence; also various figures of saints, and on the ceiling the four evangelists. These works of the painter's advanced age, which have suffered somewhat from restorations, show vigour superior to that of his youth, along with a more adequate treatment of the architectural perspectives. Naturally, there are a number of works currently attributed to Angelico, but not really his; for instance, a ”St Thomas with the Madonna's girdle,” in the Lateran museum, and a ”Virgin enthroned,” in the church of S. Girolamo, Fiesole. It has often been said that he commenced and frequently practised as an illuminator; this is dubious and a presumption arises that illuminations executed by Giovanni's brother, Benedetto, also a Dominican, who died in 1448, have been ascribed to the more famous artist. Benedetto may perhaps have a.s.sisted Giovanni in the frescoes at S. Marco, but nothing of the kind is distinctly traceable. A folio series of engravings from these paintings was published in Florence, in 1852. Along with Gozzoli already mentioned, Zan.o.bi Strozzi and Gentile da Fabriano are named as pupils of the Beato.
We have spoken of Angelico's art as ”pietistic”; this is in fact its predominant character. His visages have an air of rapt suavity, devotional fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which is intensely attractive to some minds and realizes beyond rivalry a particular ideal--that of ecclesiastical saintliness and detachment from secular fret and turmoil. It should not be denied that he did not always escape the pitfalls of such a method of treatment, the faces becoming sleek and prim, with a smirk of s.e.xless religiosity which hardly eludes the artificial or even the hypocritical; on other minds, therefore, and these some of the most masculine and resolute, he produces little genuine impression. After allowing for this, Angelico should nevertheless be accepted beyond cavil as an exalted typical painter according to his own range of conceptions, consonant with his monastic calling, unsullied purity of life and exceeding devoutness.
Exquisite as he is in his special mode of execution, he undoubtedly falls far short, not only of his great naturalist contemporaries such as Masaccio and Lippo Lippi, but even of so distant a precursor as Giotto, in all that pertains to bold or life-like invention of a subject or the realization of ordinary appearances, expressions and actions--the facts of nature, as distinguished from the aspirations or contemplations of the spirit. Technically speaking, he had much finish and harmony of composition and colour, without corresponding mastery of light and shade, and his knowledge of the human frame was restricted. The brilliancy and fair light scale of his tints is constantly remarkable, combined with a free use of gilding; this conduces materially to that celestial character which so pre-eminently distinguishes his pictured visions of the divine persons, the hierarchy of heaven and the glory of the redeemed.
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Books regarding Fra Angelico are numerous. We may mention those by S.
Beissel, 1895; V.M. Crawford, 1900; R.L. Douglas, 1900; I.B. Supino, 1901; D. Tumiati, 1897; G. Williamson, 1901.
(W.M.R.)
ANGELL, GEORGE THORNDIKE (1823-1909), American philanthropist, was born at Southbridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, on the 5th of June 1823. He graduated at Dartmouth in 1846, studied law at the Harvard Law School, and in 1851 was admitted to the bar in Boston, where he practised for many years. In 1868 he founded and became president of the Ma.s.sachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in the same year establis.h.i.+ng and becoming editor of _Our Dumb Animals_, a journal for the promotion of organized effort in securing the humane treatment of animals. For many years he was active in the organization of humane societies in England and America. In 1882 he initiated the movement for the establishment of Bands of Mercy (for the promotion of humane treatment of animals), of which in 1908 there were more than 72,000 in active existence. In 1889 he founded and became president of the American Humane Education Society. He became well known as a criminologist and also as an advocate of laws for the safeguarding of the public health and against adulteration of food. He died at Boston on the 16th of March 1909.
ANGEL-LIGHTS, in architecture, the outer upper lights in a perpendicular window, next to the springing; probably a corruption of the word angle-lights, as they are nearly triangular.
ANGELUS, a Roman Catholic devotion in memory of the Annunciation.
It has its name from the opening words, _Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae_. It consists of three texts describing the mystery, recited as versicle and response alternately with the salutation ”Hail, Mary!”
This devotion is recited in the Catholic Church three times daily, about 6 A.M., noon and 6 P.M. At these hours a bell known as the Angelus bell is rung. This is still rung in some English country churches, and has often been mistaken for and alleged to be a survival of the curfew bell. The inst.i.tution of the Angelus is by some ascribed to Pope Urban II., by some to John XXII. The triple recitation is ascribed to Louis XI. of France, who in 1472 ordered it to be thrice said daily.