CONTEMPLATING ANGELS; VATICAN ART EXHIBIT ALIGHTS IN L.A.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Without them, George Bailey wouldn't have had such a wonderful life, Nike would need to find a new corporate logo, and we all might've been spared seeing ``The Preacher's Wife.''

As the world slouches toward the new millennium, heavenly creatures are among us - cherubs, angels, seraphim, winged victories, putti or call them what you will.

Since the late 1980s, they've become nearly as overexposed as the Spice Girls, popping up everywhere from T-shirts and calendars to coffee-table books and Tony award-winning dramas. Premillennial angst may be the culprit, but that hardly seems enough to account for the current craze. Angels are a cottage industry, the decorative motif du jour, and two pensively adorable putti, lifted from Raphael's ``Sistine Madonna,'' have practically become the smile buttons of the '90s.

Now angel mania may be getting a new lift from one of the world's top specialists in celestial entities.

``The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican'' arrives today at UCLA's Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, with a major grant from the Chrysler Corp. and a flurry of tie-in cultural programming including lectures, concerts, workshops and children's activities. Los Angeles is the first stop of a five-city tour that will travel to St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore and West Palm Beach, Fla.

Tracing angel iconography from pre-Christian times to the present, the exhibition presents 110 paintings, sculptures, tapestries and liturgical vessels and vestments never before seen together outside the Vatican.

Included are a large number of Old Master paintings; striking contemporary works by Salvador Dali, Georges Rouault and Marino Marini; as well as one-of-a-kind pieces such as a gilded silver Jubilee clasp of Pope Pius IX, depicting God creating the world surrounded by his heavenly servants.

Father Allen Duston, the exhibition's director, said the objects were selected from the Vatican's wealth of museums, including its Collection of Modern Religious Art and the Missionary Ethnological Museum, which houses many artworks and religious artifacts of non-Christian cultures.

``We were looking for some kind of theme that would allow us to show off the variety and breadth of the Vatican collection, and also for a theme that would be popular,'' says Duston, who grew up in Pasadena's St. Andrew's parish.

Starting with the ninth century B.C., the exhibition shows how angels first appeared in the ancient Assyrian, Greek and Etruscan cultures. Mercury, the wing-footed Greek messenger god, could be classified as an early angel, as could Venus' prank-playing son Eros (Cupid), the god of love.

Not all these pagan angels were male. Pre-Christian female angels included the Greek Furies, ferocious spirits who took revenge on wrong-doers, and Vanth, the Etruscan underworld goddess often depicted on funerary objects. Nike, the winged victory goddess, symbolized triumph over one's enemies and, by extension, triumph over death.

Thus, from civilization's infancy, winged beings have been associated with punishing evil and meting out justice.

Angels appear throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, says Duston. In Genesis, God sends an angel to keep Abraham from slaying his son Isaac. In the story of Lot, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorra after the wayward locals tried to mess around with two angelic couriers.

Jacob famously wrestled with an angel and dreamed of angels ascending a ladder to heaven. And the Book of Isaiah describes angels with six pairs of wings: two for flying and the rest for covering their feet and faces.

Christianity proved equally adept at assimilating angels, devising an elaborate other-worldly hierarchy of nine categories, or ``choirs,'' of angels: angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim, virtues, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers.

``In fact, very little changes'' from one culture to the next, Duston observes. ``Wings usually are on the back, but sometimes on the feet, in the pre-Christian era. The function often is the same: messengers, guardians, heralds.

``The idea of an angel theologically, of course, changes. The angels often are the gods themselves (in pre-Christian iconography), whereas in Christianity, they're beings created by God for a specific purpose.''

For centuries, the challenge artists faced in depicting angels was to show what supposedly was invisible to mortal eyes. It may be noteworthy that only three archangels - Michael, Gabriel and Raphael - are well-known by name.

However anonymous or distant they may seem, angels today are widely regarded as soothing celestial go-betweens who comfort and protect humankind.

This benign image of angels, rather than the popular Renaissance icon of an armor-bedecked Michael whipping Satanic butt and weighing souls, seems to be fueling the current fad, Duston suggests.

``I think, first of all, Americans in general are religious, and so they're constantly looking at and looking for religious symbols, and angels are a positive religious symbol. They cut across many religions and many denominations and they're something people can feel good about.

``They (angels) don't particularly make demands, like Yahweh,'' Duston continued, using the Hebrew word for god. ``I think there also is the idea, even subconsciously, of the millennium there and of people thinking about the other dimension.''

Still, not all the exhibition's angels are what you'd call angelic.

Among six modern works is ``The Fall of the Angel'' (1963), a large (nearly 5 by 5 feet) semi-abstract painting by the late Italian artist Marino Marini.

``We chose the Marino Marini piece because it's one of the few works that illustrates there are such a thing as fallen angels,'' Duston says. ``We wanted to show the history of angels, which includes Satan and his company.''

Most of us, following George Bailey's lead, would probably rather deal with Clarence.

THE FACTS

What: ``The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican.''

Where: UCLA Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays. Through April.

Tickets: $4.50 for adults; $3 for seniors, non-UCLA students, UCLA faculty/staff and Alumni Association members with ID; $1 for UCLA students with ID; free for museum members and children 17 and under. Advance tickets available through Ticketmaster [phone], and UCLA Central Ticket Office, [phone].

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) On the cover: ``Angel in the Night,'' by Felice Casorati, circa 1961, tempera on paper.

(2--Color) ``The Vision of St. Helena, by Paolo Caliari (Veronese), circa 1580, oil on canvas.

(3--Color) ``Miserere,'' by Georges Rouault, 1939, tempera on paper.

(4--Color) ``Concert of Angels,'' by Baciccia (Giovanni Battista Gaulli), circa 1672, oil on canvas.

(5--Color) ``Crucifixion With Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and a Dominican Friar,'' by Andrea Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze), circa 1370-77, tempera on wood.

(6--Color) ``Fragment of sarcophagus lid with cupids aboard chariots,'' A.D. 270-80, white marble, Roman.

(7--Color) Detail of ``Angelic Landscape,'' by Salvador Dali, 1977, oil on canvas.