The Fallen Angel

The same figure, across thirty years

This catalogue holds three entries by one artist on the fallen angel, recorded at 1875, 1880 and 1905, and the interval is the point. A subject returned to across decades is not being illustrated; it is being used. In the inherited scheme there is no order called fallen — the fall removes an angel from the orders entirely, leaving a being with wings and no office. That vacancy is what a symbolist painter could keep coming back to, and what an altarpiece never had a use for.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates this entry to 1905 and gives Odilon Redon, a French painter, with the style term Symbolism. The measured colour family is blue. The recorded location is a private collection, and no dimensions are recorded. The subject fields are the unexpected part: the record files the work under landscape and seascape, and under colour, rather than under religion.

An angel filed as weather

That filing is not an error to correct. It describes what happened to the figure late in the nineteenth century: the angel drifted out of the doctrinal scheme and into atmosphere, and cataloguing follows. Of the 224 works on this site, 54 are dated to the nineteenth century and 12 to the twentieth, and across that late group the ranked heaven has effectively vanished — no seraph, no cherub, no order named anywhere. What remains is a single undifferentiated figure that can be filed under sky.