St. Uriel, Archangel, from a Peruvian Spanish Colonial work

Angels of the Andes:
An Appreciation of the Heavenly Side of Spanish Colonial Art

I was recently in Denver, and had time to stop and view one of my favorite American museums, the Denver Art Museum. It may not be on par with the Chicago Art Institute or the Metropolitan, but nonetheless it has an excellent and rather sizable collection of lesser-know (but still high-quality art). While I tend not to stray beyond the European and Chinese galleries in museums, it also has a fascinating selection of American Indian and Western American art, including some spectacular examples of Northwest Coast Indian woodwork.

My favorite floor is the one devoted to Spain's reign in the Americas. I have a great love of Spanish colonial art and music, as anyone who's followed this 'blog knows, and Denver was the first place I was introduced to it in great detail. Rather than merely being limited to the crude (but engaging) santos carvings of New Mexico as in many other American museums, their Hispanic collection includes sophisticated and ornate works from Mexico to Peru, including numerous lace-bedecked images of the Virgin, intricate allegories and a remarkable sample of a series showing the Seven Archangels vanquishing the demons of the Seven Deadly Sins. The cultus of the Archangels was particularly strong in Spanish America, a land then still without the great panoply of local saints seen in Europe and thus in need of more universal protectors. Indeed, it's one of the few places in art you can glimpse the elusive Archangel Uriel.

Pious tradition holds that the choir of archangels has seven members; the rolls of their membership, both Catholic and heterodox, vary wildly. Since the revival of their cultus in the eighteenth century after laying dormant since the ninth, the current list seems to be the usual Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, as well as Uriel, Shealtiel, Jehudiel and Berachiel (though the Catholic Encyclopedia gives another list). These names were rediscovered when, three centuries ago, an ancient fresco containing their images and appelations was uncovered in an old church in Palermo dedicated to them. Besides that, there's a church in Germany which honors them.

However, in general, they're scarce in Europe. The unfortunate association of St. Uriel and some of those more obscure angels with the occult and the unorthodox Jewish mystical school of Kabbala tended to leave a bad taste in the mouth (as will any web search devoted to ferreting out useful information on him, as it seems to turn up a host of crackpot new-age sites with little interest in fact and less in holiness). One negative account even made Uriel, rather than being the "fire of God," the hellish "President of Tartarus." Though, in all fairness, that title might also indicate the heavenly angel who locks the Devil into Gehenna at the end of time. Whatever the case, he'd been stricken from the calendar before, in 745, when a number of other angels of apocryphal provenance were removed. Legend has it that one of them, an angel named Sadoc, was so annoyed at his demotion that he would interrupt Mass with loud flatulent noises. Another account places his excision from the calendar at the time of the Renaissance. Nonetheless, St. Uriel proved resilient and ended up getting a new feast for him and his six archangelic compatriots on April 20, celebrated to this day at Palermo.

Whatever the case, the Seven enflamed the imagination of Spanish America, particularly the lands once under the rule of the Inca, already so high in the mountains as to scrape the angelic firmament. Angels are all over the place in Peruvian art, holding up the sudarium, trampling devils, lauding the Virgin and Her Child, or even firing off matchlock muskets. Some of these angels seem so androgynous to us in their lacy skirts and curls that modern art historians have branded them "female-dressed angels," who recall the bodiless nature of the Heavenly Hosts. I'm inclined to think this supposed effeminacy has more to do with the Baroque mania for filigree than anything else. But then, there are the ones with guns, quite masculine. They verge on being sacred dandies in their fine swaggering military clothes, modelled on the uniforms of Spanish soldiers. So close is that correspondence that many of them are shown drilling with muskets in poses straight out of a seventeenth-century drill handbook. St. Uriel is typically one of them, a very suitable candidate for a marksman with his association with divine fire. It is a strange and picturesque note, reminding us of the psychological affect that European weaponry had on the Indians of our continent.

The "Angels with Guns," as they are called today, were first painted to impress the newly-conquered Incas by the power of God's bodiless agents. In time, however, the weapons became tokens of Divine protection, a bellicose comfort against demonic temptation. In many ways, it's no stranger than seeing St. Michael in medieval armor, St. Barbara in the clothes of a German princess or St. George dressed as a fashionable Renaissance gentleman. Though somehow the image of St. Michael in camoflage with an AK-47 doesn't quite strike the same quaint note.

Be that as they may, I find them quite charming, and at the same time, the recollection of Spain's military might, the sight of that belch of flame, and the memory of the smell of black powder from my father's shotgun still makes me wonder at how much more magnificent and powerful the Host of Heaven must be on parade.