An Angel Playing a Flageolet
By Elle Borissow
A luminous vision of the Angelic musician, the below example of An Angel Playing a Flageolet (1878) glows radiantly in soft golden gouache tones and opalescent pastels. Others in series, on the same motif, emerge via layered watercolours, or in egg tempura; but this pastel version in particular captures something of the ephemeral angelic touch, and the fleeting contemplative aura of Christmas spiritually potent time of year.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, An Angel Playing a Flageolet, c.1880, chalk pastel and gouache on paper. 27.3 x 18.4cm. Image Courtesy of the Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonne Website.
Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne Jones’ depictions of angels often sought to harmonise a Christian iconography of divinity with a pictorial synthesis of the liberal arts: namely, music; painting; and poetry.
From an intellectual standpoint, when situated among his wider body of works, Burne-Jones’ motivations for the compositional synthesis of painting, music, and literature stemmed from contemporary debate of (and belief in) music’s superior ability to access higher emotional or spiritual planes owing to its abstracted – thereby, unrestricted – form of expression. The essays of Richard Wagner played a particularly seminal role in this discussion at the turn of the twentieth century, and we can see here the centrality of this context within the image.
This art-historical perspective is, however, vitally nuanced on a theological level. Pertinent to the Christmas period, Burne-Jones’ chalky imagination of angelic lyricism recalls the Christmas Nativity story: it is significant in its use of the Bible as a literary reference for Angel Playing a Flageolet, but moreover, the choice of instrument symbolically recalls an announcement. Here, the flageolet as an elegant type of trumpet is particularly suited to the Angel Gabriel’s annunciation of the baby Jesus, whose birth, and impending arrival (advent), marks this spiritually poignant period of waiting for the Christian believer.