you make an anatomical nondescript, an impossible monster, devoid of truth, false to nature, odious to the highest art.
The smooth, comparatively hairless skin of man, angel, or devil, is incompatible with the feathers of a bird's wings; his bony tissue has not the air-spaces, nor does it communicate with the lungs, as in the bird, which is thus rendered specifically lighter. His thorax or chest is too movable for the support of muscles of flight, even if angels were made armless and winged; his breastbone is smooth, not keeled as in birds; so that flying angels must of necessity be deformed and pigeon breasted if they had muscles of flight. The biped attitude of the bird requires a change of posture, an horizontality, to get the center of gravity between the shoulders for flight, which would render man a ridiculous figure. As far as we know locomotion in the animal kingdom, the wings and the legs are not moved at the same time in progression in the air; it is seen only in some birds with very rudimentary or short wings, who use their wings to help them in running on the ground, which is not the ideal of the artist's angel. The ideal, or that which suggests the idea of a heavenly messenger, need not be false to nature; an angel without wings is just as ideal and suggestive, and not an anatomical impossibility. That the form of an angel need not of necessity have wings is shown by a painting in the museum at Naples of the "Holy Family," attributed to an artist of the Florentine school, in every respect admirable, and usually called the "Virgin of Purity." The angels have no wings, and carry lilies in their hands; wings would have added nothing to the picture, which is remarkable for its natural beauty.
It seems to me that an angel without wings, floating upon surrounding clouds (like the "hours" in Guide's "Aurora"), is a much higher symbol of a supernatural messenger than the conventional winged one; it indicates a spirit, an ethereal substance, a mere outline figure suggestive of motion; but if you add the unnatural and impossible wings to the arms, you make a monster in human form, defy the process of reasoning, rob the image of its spirituality, and degrade it to a coarse and earthy symbol, inconsistent with the idea it is intended to convey.
I will allude to a few other monstrosities in ancient art, copied by the moderns, to further illustrate my meaning.
It was natural that a barbarous people, at the first and distant view of men on horseback, should imagine that they were creatures half man and half horse; hence the fabled Centaurs, a people of Thessaly, who were among the earliest to bring the horse into the service of man. As is well known, the Centaurs had the head, arms, chest, and body of a man as far as the hips, joined to the chest, body, and four limbs of the horse. Though a Centaur at rest is a noble figure, symbolic of strength, swiftness, intelligence, and protection of man by the Olympian gods, the position which the creature was supposed to assume in his contact with man, as shown in many mural tablets found at Pompeii, and now in the museum at Naples, is ridiculous and impossible.
