Angel with the Arma Christi

Entry

Standing on an arched, hexagonal socle, this angel wears the vestments of a deacon who assists the priest during the liturgy: an alb with amice (a white cloth worn about the shoulders and neck) and a cope. Below the right shoulder, the full-length cope folds up and over the upper arm, pressed against the body. Just above the forehead, voluminous curls of hair emerge from beneath an ornamental woven band with pearls. In his left hand, concealed beneath the folds of his robes, the angel holds a tournament helmet in his left hand. Draped across the top of this helmet is Christ’s robe, which he grazes lightly with the fingers of his right hand. Lying next to the robe is what little remains of the crown of thorns, which has largely broken off.

Even to this day, statues of angels bearing emblems of Christ’s suffering, appearing typically in pairs, are still commonly encountered along the Lower Rhine. The term Arma Christi (Weapons of Christ) is used to describe the instruments of the Passion: the crown of thorns, the flagellation pillar, the whipping rod, the cross, Veronica’s veil, the nails driven through Christ’s hands and feet on the cross, the spear used to pierce his heart, the soldiers playing dice for his robe, the vinegar-soaked sponge from which he drank, and his five holy wounds.²

In the fifteenth century, angels clad as deacons and accompanied by the Arma Christi were placed in the chancels of churches in the Low Countries. Numerous paintings and miniatures of this period convey an idea of their placement in a church’s interior. One of the finest examples is Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The painting shows the celebration of Mass in the chancel of a church. Erected on both sides of the altar are tall columns surmounted by bronze statues of angels displaying the Arma Christi. As the painting illustrates, these figures often appeared in pairs, with one angel holding the flagellation pillar and whipping rod as attributes, while a second angel bears Christ’s Cross and crown of thorns.

Far less common are pairs of angels such as those destined for the high altar in the chancel of Xanten Cathedral, installed in 1477 and in all probability produced in the workshop of Master Arnt (active c. 1460-d. 1492) in Kalkar. Preserved to this day, the duo comprises one angel holding a flagellation pillar and an escutcheon bearing a painted image of the Arma Christi, and a second angel displaying a helmet with Christ’s robe and the crown of thorns. The figures appear as if suspended in air, an effect achieved through the bending of the knees.³ Linked to the Xanten group are a series of comparable angel pairs. In qualitative terms, the most significant of these works are the angel in the Rijksmuseum discussed here, and a version – also bearing the helmet, crown of thorns, and robe – in the Bode-Museum in Berlin. Variants are found in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and in the churches of Borth and Dinslaken. Another version, later sawn off at the level of the waist and leaving only the upper section, is preserved in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.⁴ Recently, De Werd convincingly argued that an angel of similar size and style, holding a flagellation pillar and an escutcheon carved with the Arma Christi, would have formed the Amsterdam angel’s pendant.⁵

The Amsterdam angel has been worked on all sides, raising the probability that it too once stood on a column where it could be observed from every angle. Much of the original polychromy has been lost, with the exception of several paint remnants on the reverse, where mortises for mounting the (missing) wings can also be seen. In terms of composition, the sculpture is clearly derived from the angels in Xanten, which probably served as the prototype. By comparison, the face on the Amsterdam angel is rounder and the body more compact, while the contrapposto motif – standing on one leg with the other leg free – has come to replace the floating effect with bent knees. Nevertheless, every detail clearly betrays the signature of Master Arnt: the round, bulging eyeballs, the small mouth, the short nose and the folds of the robes gathering about the socle are all characteristics encountered in works produced in his workshop, starting with his choir stalls in Cleves in the year 1474.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally published in F. Scholten and G. de Werd, Een hogere werkelijkheid: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Eine höhere Wirklichkeit, Deutsche und Französische Skulptur 1200-1600 aus dem Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Cleves (Museum Kurhaus Kleve) 2004-06, no. 3