The Fallen Angel by Cabanel: Beauty, Tears, and Rebellion (1847)
A young man with dark wings and a mane of red-brown hair lies on a rock, his body twisted, his arms crossed in front of his face. Only his eyes show above them, and they are full of anger. A single tear runs down from one of them. Behind him, in a pale blue sky, a procession of angels drifts away in a glow of light, leaving him behind. This is Lucifer after the fall, as the young Alexandre Cabanel imagined him in 1847. The Fallen Angel, now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, has become one of the most shared images of the devil in Western art.
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Artist: Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889)
Date: 1847
Medium: Oil on canvas, 121 × 189.7 cm
Collection: Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
Notable fact: Painted when Cabanel was only 24, as a student in Rome
What does the painting show?
Cabanel gives Lucifer the body of a classical hero. He lies stretched across the canvas from left to right, almost life size, his powerful legs crossed, his torso turned towards us, his huge wings folded behind him in shades of black, blue and white. There are no horns, no tail, no fire. Nothing in his body tells us he is evil. Everything is in the face.
And the face is half hidden. Lucifer raises his forearms and clenches his hands together in front of his mouth and nose, as if to shield himself or to hold something back. Above his arms, his eyes stare out at the viewer from under his brows, burning with resentment. Look closely and you will see a tear in the corner of one eye. It is the detail that makes the picture: rage and grief at the same moment, pride wounded but not broken.
Behind him, the sky is bright and calm. A long line of angels, painted in pale, almost transparent blues and whites, floats away towards the light, carrying the order of heaven with them. Lucifer is left on the dark rocks of the earth, among a few sprigs of ivy, cut off for ever from the world he has just lost.
The rebel angel
The figure of the angel who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven comes from Christian tradition, but its most influential version is John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), where Satan is a tragic, magnificent figure, proud and defiant even in defeat. The Romantic generation of the early nineteenth century was fascinated by this rebel, and Cabanel's angel belongs to that tradition: more a fallen hero than a monster.
Other painters had imagined the fight itself, like Raphael in Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan, where the archangel tramples the devil underfoot. Cabanel shows what comes after: the loneliness of the defeated. For a later, very different devil, one who smiles instead of scowling, see Ludwik Stasiak's Allegory of Satan, and for the war between heaven and hell over a single soul, Tassaert's Heaven and Hell.
A young painter in Rome
Cabanel was born in Montpellier in 1823 and trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1845 he won a Prix de Rome, which took him to the French Academy at the Villa Medici, and he painted The Fallen Angel there at the age of twenty-four. The smooth anatomy, the clear drawing and the careful finish already show the qualities that would make him famous. Sixteen years later his Birth of Venus was bought by Napoleon III at the Salon of 1863.
He went on to become one of the most influential teachers in Paris, training dozens of painters, among them Pierre-Auguste Cot, the author of The Storm, and the Breton painter Alfred Guillou, whose Adieu! shows a very different kind of tragedy.
Where can you see it?
The painting belongs to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the painter's home town, one of the finest museums of art in the south of France. It is usually on display in the galleries of nineteenth-century French painting.
See Cabanel’s The Fallen Angel framed on your wall: a museum-quality print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Sources
Utpictura18 (Aix-Marseille University), "The Fallen Angel – Cabanel"; Wikipedia, "Alexandre Cabanel"; DailyArt, "The Fallen Angel".
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