No Angel Wings and No Dragon Bones

I’ve had a saying for years: there are no angel wings and no dragon bones. It is a provocation, and it needs unpacking. There are winged beings in biblical literature, and there are fossilised wings. What interests me is the distance between the evidence we have and the picture we carry.

If I ask you to imagine an angel, a human figure with feathered wings may appear almost immediately. But where did that particular figure come from? Was it the passage you read, the painting you saw, or the image that had become familiar before you ever asked?

The visitors and the vision

In Genesis 18, Abraham receives visitors described as men. Genesis 19 identifies two arriving in Sodom as angels, while the story also calls them men. Neither narrative describes feathered wings on these visitors. Hebrews 13:2 speaks of people offering hospitality to angels without knowing it.^[1][2]

That is the distinction I mean. The human-appearing messengers in these accounts are not described as the feather-winged figures familiar from art. It is a claim about what those passages say, rather than a declaration about every being later placed under the word ‘angel’.

Isaiah 6 describes seraphim with six wings. It mentions faces, feet and a hand, but does not specify feathers or provide a complete anatomy. Ezekiel’s living creatures have humanlike form alongside four faces, four wings, unusual feet and human hands beneath their wings; chapter 10 identifies them as cherubim. Calling them wholly non-humanoid would also lose something the text contains.^[3][4]

The descriptions are stranger and more varied than the familiar picture. Letting them remain different makes them more interesting to me.

When a picture becomes familiar

Then there are the babies. The winged infants known as putti have roots in Greek and Roman antiquity and appear in both religious and secular art. Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, painted in 1512–1513, includes the famous pair leaning at its lower edge. The Renaissance gave this visual tradition a remarkable expression; it did not invent every winged human angel.^[5][6]

Winged human angels appear in art much earlier. A sixth-century Byzantine ivory archangel in the British Museum gives us one surviving example. The history is layered: different artistic forms, religious uses and audiences, rather than a single moment when somebody added wings.^[7]

I imagine a child seeing the same sacred figure again and again. Later, the child reads a passage, and the picture is already waiting. No one needs deliberately to confuse the painting with the text. Familiarity has done some of the interpretive work before the reading begins.

Erwin Panofsky’s account of iconography and iconology helps me ask better questions of such images. Describing what is visible, recognising a conventional subject and interpreting its wider cultural significance are different tasks. A pair of wings is a visible feature; what those wings mean depends on the world around the image.^[8]

The serpent, the flame and the fossil

My curiosity about dragons begins in that space between a form and its meaning. The Hebrew term saraph belongs to a vocabulary associated with burning and serpents. Biblical scholar Richard Lederman explores connections between Isaiah’s seraphim and ancient winged-serpent imagery. That gives the comparison a serious starting point, while leaving the beings’ interpretation open.^[9]

Job 41 brings another image into view. Its Leviathan has closely fitted scales; smoke comes from its nostrils, and flame from its mouth. That is much closer to some familiar dragon imagery than the human visitors of Genesis. I want to explore the resemblance without deciding that Leviathan, seraphim and every later dragon are the same being.^[10]

And the bones? Pterosaurs were real flying reptiles. Their fossil record includes wing bones; the Natural History Museum holds specimens used to study them. So my saying cannot mean that the earth has yielded no evidence of a reptile with wings. It has.^[11]

A fossil wing does not establish a fire-breathing creature, however. Nor does the later name ‘dragon’ tell us, by itself, what an ancient storyteller encountered. We need to distinguish an animal’s remains, a cultural name and the abilities attributed to a legendary being.

The meeting between fossils and stories can be wonderfully tangible. At Whitby, ammonites were interpreted as snakes turned to stone; some later sellers even carved heads onto them. Here an actual fossil, a local legend and an added artistic detail become part of the same object’s history.^[12]

That is the kind of movement I want to understand: what people observe, how they interpret it, what they create from it and what the next generation inherits.

The pictures we inherit

As someone who makes things, I find this powerful. An image can teach us how to see. A story can give an experience a name. Creation enters the shared world and becomes part of the material through which other people imagine reality.

My saying has become a question worth keeping open: when I think I know what something looks like, whose picture am I remembering?

Edlin