An Angel in the Clouds, Fiddling

 

Coleridge visited Rome in January 1806, stopping off on his journey from Malta to England (he finally reached home in August). Whilst there he visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest Catholic Marian church in the city. This is what he jotted into his notebook:

5 Jan 1806——Santa Maria Maggiore/glorious [...] in the right hand colonnade a picture of a Hermit ascetic with his Hand resting on a book holding a Death's Head, & an angel in the Clouds fiddling to him./  [Coburn (ed) Coleridge Collected Notebooks (5 vols Princeton 1961-2002), 2: 2786]

I was curious about this artwork, so I checked. It's still there, as you can see from the image at the head of this post. The artist is not known, although STC's ‘hermit’ is actually Saint Francis of Assisi. It's perhaps surprising Coleridge didn't recognise that (you think he'd at least notice that the figure is dressed in Franciscan robes), although it presumably only speaks to his principled Protestant ignorance about the finer points of Catholicism. Coleridge finds the notion of an angel ‘fiddling’ to the saint a comical one, but in fact Saint Francis hearing visionary music is an important episode in his hagiography. 

The story goes that, having established the Franciscan order, the now elderly Francis resigned from its leadership to go into the wilderness for prayer and contemplation. He had a series of visions, including one in which an angel marked him with Christ's stigmata. The musical miracle is first recorded in Bonaventure's Life of Saint Francis (1261): Francis, alone, exhausted and suffering from the illness that would eventually kill him (hence the death's head in the Santa Maria Maggiore painting), desired that his spirits be lifted with some music. Since his solitude made this impossible an angel was sent to play for him. When Francis heard the heavenly music, he looked up and saw the musical angel, who advanced from and retreated into the clouds depending on the intensity of his (her? its?) playing. ‘The angel's music was so sweetly ethereal that it filled Francis with the Holy Spirit, and he felt as if he had already ascended into heaven.’ A violin is not specified in Bonaventure's Vita, but is the instrument often represented in devotional art. Here's an etching by Franceso Vanni (c.1600):

And here's an early 17th-C canvas by Guercino:

It isn't always a fiddle, though. Here's a painting by Francisco Ribalta (c.1620):

And here, the image still carrying its Matthieson Gallery watermark, is a photograph of a wooden bas relief by the Garcia brothers (pre 1619): 

It's interesting how, being innocent of this context, Coleridge can only see the image as ridiculous. Context matters, evidently. Music was very important to him, after all: his ode to Wordsworth praises his friend's poems as ‘an Orphic song indeed,/A song divine of high and passionate thoughts/To their own music chaunted!’ And towards the end of his life, in 1832, he divided poetry into two classes: one corresponding to ‘poetry’ the other to ‘music’, adding ‘if I belong to any class of poets it is most preeminently the latter.’ But this image of St Francis in Rome clearly struck him for its bathos, not its poetic elevation.