Fra Angelico's dancing heaven
Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies.
An unusually close visual comparison is Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, about 1423–24, the central predella panel from the San Domenico altarpiece at Fiesole. The National Gallery's collection record identifies two angels at the lower left who seem to dance to the heavenly music, and describes the blue-and-gold wings as patterned like peacock feathers. Here a carefully ordered devotional image contains actual playfulness: celestial dignity does not require immobility. National Gallery, NG663.1, ‘About the work’.
The comparison also marks the limit of Chesterton's description. These wings are feathered; ‘almost as butterflies’ conveys an impression of delicacy and buoyancy rather than identifying their zoological model. Nor does this one panel establish his assertion about all Angelico's angels or the whole Middle Ages. It supplies a concrete example of the quality he prizes. His contrast with Burne-Jones remains a critical judgment about spiritual mood, not a neutral classification of artistic competence. In the chapter's movement from aristocratic pomposity toward humility, the art becomes a visible argument: authority and sanctity need not wear the expression of their own importance.
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