Depicting the Sound of Silence: Angel-Musicians in Trecento Sacred Art

Abstract

The effusion of music-making angels in medieval art stood in opposition to the fact that in Scripture, angels did not perform music, and to contemporaneous beliefs that they were both bodiless and silent. This rupture between signification and idiom suggests that angel-musicians were more than passive symbols of “concelebration,” the idea that angels and humans performed the liturgy in concert with one another. I propose a synthetic account of their meanings and functions, focusing on Trecento Tuscany as a place where diverse artistic modes and devotional practices blended and clashed. Because the medieval Church evolved images and rituals based on the notion that angelic ministry was exemplary for human practice, I have organized my chapters around four key precepts of angelology: the angels’ liminality, operations in the aesthetic realm, ideal enactment of the liturgy, and multiplicity. Considered in these terms, images of angel-musicians effected the presence of actual angels in order to entice human viewers into joining their liturgy mystically, an act of profound spiritual benefit. This contention is predicated on the beliefs that although angels were technically ineffable, they were also able to traverse the divide between heaven and earth. By mediating the sensible and suprasensible, the images achieved their goal by facilitating individual acts of contemplation; by aestheticizing the spiritual sweetness of angels’ song; by modeling the angels’ roles as co-worshippers, ministers, and celestial assistants; and by proliferating in all types of sacred art, in which they were forces of active engagement that helped to “angelize” people’s mental worlds and ritual behaviors.