In the National Art Museum of Catalonia is preserved a wooden panel painted around 1490 by Juan de la Abadía, an artist active in the city of Huesca in Aragon during the last decades of the fifteenth century. Standing here full-length upon a floor of checkered tiles, red and dark in tone, the Archangel Michael forms what was likely the central section of a larger polyptych executed for a church in the region of Liesa. The subject here is not the familiar image of the warrior crushing the dragon, but a rarer moment, that of judgment, where the destiny of every soul literally hangs from a balance.
The Figure of the Archangel Michael Between Art and Theology
His wings spread behind him in two bands of color, scaly green on the inside and dark red at the edges, while a halo of concentric circles of gold frames his face with its lowered eyelids. He wears a red headcovering over his hair, a cuirass with relief decoration, and a red cloak that billows in undulating folds, recalling a courtly knight more than an Old Testament warrior.
With his right hand he raises diagonally a long spear, threatening the demon that appears on the right side of the composition—a serpentine creature with scales and clawed feet—as it attempts to pull down one scale of the balance. With his left hand he holds steady the beam of the instrument, at the other end of which kneels a haloed figure, perhaps another angel, beside a second figure dressed in white. Every detail of the armor appears wrought with the precision of a goldsmith, in a tradition of Gothic art that borrows from Flemish models without losing its own heavy and almost metallic sense of volume. Nor does anyone know today precisely which church in Liesa it once adorned.
(Translated from the original Greek text by K. Pappas)
