ANGELS AND ARCHANGELS

... after associating them with Prehispanic winged images or warrior birds.

Colonial painters imagined them eternally young, asexual, dressed in long robes or in military uniform.

The archangel Michael, the head of the celestial cohorts and the fighter of the devil, was quite popular and was adopted as patron of the indigenous brotherhood in Lima.

In the one shown here over a landscape background, he is not portrayed killing the demon or with the scales.

He uses to weigh souls, but dressed in knight's armor and with a military staff, instead of his customary sword.

Raphael is considered the head of the guardian archangels and therefore of humanity.

He is identified by the fish he carries in his hands and whose bile he usted to cure the blindness of Tobias's father. Until the early eighteenth century, the young Tobias was often represented with Raphael.

In the late seventeenth century, the combination of European art forms and Prehispanic traditions gave rise to the harquebusier archangel, considered an original invention of the Southern Peruvian Andes.

In this image, the archangel carries the Spanish harquebus, whose sound evoked the thunder (one of the attributes of the god Illapa)