Three Angels Contained by Architecture
In Veneziano's Madonna and Child with Saints, the halo of one of the angels encircles a supporting column of the structure housing Mary and Infant. This effectively makes the angel part of architecture, suggesting that if he were to leave the building would topple or, at the very least, limiting the sphere of the angel's divine existence. This is a very famous painting (it is featured full-colour in Jantzen's History of Art) yet I am the first person in the world to notice this. A man woke to find an angel kneeling by his bed. Whenever the angel sighed the man would hear the sound of the autumn wind in the maples for the angel's wings filled the whole room, their tips brushing against the cold plaster of the walls. And the angel said to the man: Take this razor and draw it lightly across my left nipple. There exist, in certain buildings, rooms which are completely sealed off, no windows, no doors, no heating ducts. Each of these special rooms contains an angel who perpetually counts the number of its bones, arriving always at the same figure. One such building is in Warsaw, another in Venice. There are no angels in the secret chambers of the great pyramids. |