Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Music Making Angels” (1628) is an ecstatic meditation on sound made visible. The canvas divides heaven into two choirs that lean toward one another, enfolding a column of golden light. Angels play viol, lute, cornetto, recorder, and bowed strings while clouds churn like billowing drapery. Putti cluster between the groups, their soft bodies catching and throwing light like living resonators. The scene is not merely a concert; it is a vision of harmony as a force that shapes the cosmos. With characteristic Baroque energy, Rubens translates rhythm, timbre, and volume into gesture, color, and radiance so that the viewer senses music even in silence.
Historical Context and Devotional Purpose
The painting belongs to the Counter-Reformation decades when Catholic patrons commissioned images that joined theological clarity to emotional splendor. Choirs of angels were a favored subject because they dramatized the idea that worship is continuous in heaven and that earthly liturgy participates in that eternal praise. Rubens, who painted large altarpieces and ceiling cycles, embraced the challenge of making sound intelligible to the eye. “Music Making Angels” likely functioned as a decorative and devotional panel in a chapel or palace where music itself was performed. Its orchestration of instruments also reflects court culture in the Spanish Netherlands, where cultivated audiences took pride in the latest sonorities and in the visual pageantry that accompanied them.
A Double Choir and the Architecture of Sound
Rubens structures the composition as an antiphonal space: a left choir anchored by a seated viol player answers a right choir led by a lutenist and wind players. Between them opens a vertical shaft of light that reads as both divine presence and acoustic axis. This spatial choreography is what music theorists would call responsorial—one group offers a phrase, the other responds. The thick, rolling clouds act like sounding boards, channeling a visual echo across the divide. The figures lean into the central radiance, suggesting that harmony is not merely horizontal exchange but a rising offering toward the source of light.
Instruments, Hands, and the Likeness of Sound
Every instrument is observed with loving accuracy yet painted with Rubens’s flexible shorthand. The bass viol on the left rests against the player’s shoulder; the left hand draws the bow while the right hand shapes a chord, a position that captures the moment when harmony swells. The lute on the right curves like a crescent moon, fingers skimming the courses with the tender confidence of a practiced player. Wind instruments push forward from cheeks and hands—recorder, cornetto, and a second mouthpiece glimpsed behind a shoulder—each angled so the viewer feels the pressure of breath. Rubens paints the contact points with tactile specificity: fingertips dimpling strings, bow hair flashing, lips against wood. Through these small truths the invisible qualities of sound become visible acts of touch and breath.
Light as Music
The canvas glows from a brilliant source at the top center, and that light behaves like a musical key that unifies disparate parts. It slants down to kiss blond curls, skates across the polished belly of the lute, and slides along the rib of the viol. Rubens feathers the rays with rapid, dissolving strokes that mimic the way vibration fades in air. Highlights accumulate where sound would be brightest—on vibrating strings and on the handles of wind instruments—so that illumination itself reads like tone. Shadows remain warm, never dead, preserving a hushed resonance as if the clouds were absorbing and returning the choir’s notes.
Color Harmony and Emotional Temperature
Rubens organizes color the way a composer assigns timbres. Warm reds and oranges gather near the lower registers where the viol grounds the choir, while cooler whites and silvers circulate among the airborne putti. A rich honeyed gold dominates the center, suggesting a major key of jubilation rather than a minor lament. The lutenist’s white garment, glazed with amber light, becomes a visual treble line that you can almost hear singing above the darker strings. Small passages of blue and gray in wings and clouds add intervals of calm that keep the orchestration from overheating. Nothing is arbitrary; every hue contributes to the choir’s emotional temperature.
Gesture, Rhythm, and Baroque Movement
Rubens composes movement as if he were writing measures in common time. Arms curve and countercurve, bows rise and descend, cheeks puff, and curls ripple along rhythmic arcs that carry the eye from one group to the other and back again. On the left, a tilted angel turns from a colleague as if to propose the next phrase; on the right, a cluster leans forward to answer. Even the putti between the choirs keep time: one turns his head in expectant delight, another lifts a hand as if counting beats. The entire cloud mass sways, a visual rubato that makes the piece feel performed rather than staged.
The Body as Instrument
Rubens understood the body’s acoustic work. The lutenist’s torso twists to accommodate strumming; the viol player’s shoulder lifts into the bow stroke; wind players expand their ribs while stabilizing elbows against air. These kinetic truths make the music credible. The angels are not ethereal abstractions. They are athletes of praise whose labor is beautiful because it is devoted. The tiny wings on several shoulders reinforce the theme. They are too small for literal flight but perfectly sized to register air as it shivers under sound.
The Putti as Resonant Choir
Clustered in the center, the putti act like a chorus of overtones. Their soft, rounded bodies pick up light from every direction, just as overtones add shimmering color to a fundamental pitch. They do not play instruments; they listen, sway, and sing. Some clap or open their mouths in a wordless vowel. Their presence is crucial to the picture’s scale. Without them, the choirs would feel like two human ensembles; with them, the music becomes cosmic, an event echoed by countless voices in heaven.
Surface, Brushwork, and the Illusion of Sound
Look close and the painting reveals Rubens’s calligraphic brush. He lays in clouds with swift, curling strokes that never settle into hard edges, exactly the way a note smears into air. Garments are hatched and glazed so folds move like liquid. Instruments receive just enough descriptive precision—rosette on the lute, ribs on the viol, keys on the wind pipes—to anchor recognition, then dissolve into energy. This balance keeps the eye in motion. The surface never stiffens into still life; it vibrates like a string under bow.
Iconography and Theological Resonance
The subject carries more than musical delight. Angelic choirs are a traditional symbol of the ordered universe praising its maker. The golden light that opens at the top center reads as divine presence, the invisible conductor whose pulse animates every figure. The antiphonal pattern also echoes liturgical practice, turning the viewer into a participant who stands where the congregation would answer the choir. Rubens, steeped in the spirituality of the era, makes the case that beauty is a path to God and that music is the art closest to love because it orders time with joy.
Comparison with Court and Church Music
Contemporary audiences would have recognized the instruments and even imagined their timbres. The cornetto’s bright, reedy voice could pierce the cloud like a shaft of light; the recorder would soften the phrase; the lute would scatter pearly arpeggios; the bass viol would supply depth and warmth. Rubens distributes these timbres across the surface with a composer’s ear, giving each its own space while letting them overlap in sympathetic resonance. The painting thus functions as a portrait of seventeenth-century sound culture, where sacred and secular instruments freely mingled in chapels and salons.
Spatial Illusion and the Viewer’s Position
The bright central opening acts like a stage portal drawing the spectator upward. The left and right choirs angle in such a way that the viewer stands at the perfect listening point, a kind of heavenly sweet spot. Clouds roll to the lower edge of the canvas, inviting the beholder to imagine stepping onto their soft platforms. Rubens had decorated ceilings where such openings were literal illusions, and he brings that knowledge to this easel-size vision. The result is a picture that expands beyond its frame, as if its music continues in the room where it hangs.
Sensuality, Innocence, and the Ethics of Delight
Flesh in Rubens is famously alive. Here the sensuality is purified by purpose. Shoulders gleam because they work; cheeks flush because they breathe; feet and hands read as tender because they serve the music. Nothing feels ornamental or coquettish. Delight becomes a moral quality, a participation in the order of love that the painting celebrates. The viewer is invited to enjoy without guilt, the way one enjoys a choir in a church where beauty is received as prayer.
Workshop Practice and the Master’s Hand
Rubens managed a large studio capable of producing complex multi-figure scenes at speed. Assistants likely blocked in clouds or secondary angels, but the leading players and the central light bear the mark of the master’s finishing touch. Faces are quickly but decisively resolved; hands are constructed with anatomical authority; the key instruments glitter with accurate highlights. The entire ensemble hangs together with the elastic unity that only Rubens could impose—individual voices fused into a single chorus.
The Place of the Painting in Rubens’s Oeuvre
“Music Making Angels” sits comfortably among Rubens’s heavenly visions and his portraits of earthly musicians. It shares the upward drive of his Marian altarpieces and the theatrical glow of his mythologies. What distinguishes it is the single-minded focus on sound. Many of his works include angels; few turn so completely on the act of music-making itself. The picture thus offers a privileged glimpse into Rubens’s understanding of harmony as an aesthetic and spiritual principle.
Why the Image Still Resonates
Modern viewers who know nothing of seventeenth-century instruments still feel the painting’s pulse. The division into choirs mirrors our experience of stereo sound; the golden column resembles the way music seems to open space; the gestures read as pure rhythm. At the same time, connoisseurs of Baroque performance can delight in the descriptive truth of cornetto and viol. The work succeeds at several levels because Rubens has tuned it like a great chord—simple enough to enjoy instantly, rich enough to explore for a lifetime.
Conclusion
“Music Making Angels” is Rubens’s hymn to harmony. The painter arranges two heavenly choirs around a column of light, translates timbre into color, converts rhythm into gesture, and turns a silent canvas into an instrument. Through instruments accurately observed and bodies joyfully engaged, he proposes that music is a foretaste of the world set right. The work invites viewers to listen with their eyes and to discover in the glow between the choirs the presence that makes every true song possible. It remains one of the most persuasive visual arguments for the holiness of delight and for the power of art to render the invisible audible.