Angel, Sainte-Chapelle

Auguste Mestral was one of five photographers hired by the French government in 1851 to document the nation's architectural heritage in photographic surveys known as the Heliographic Missions. A few years later, the sculptor Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy Dechaume commissioned him to record the angels of the Passion he had just produced for the restoration of Sainte-Chapelle, a splendid 13th-century chapel in the heart of Paris. Mestral photographed each sculpture on the ground, backed with a white sheet to set it off, before it was hoisted into place atop the spires. The angel depicted here bears some of the instruments of the Passion, objects associated with Christ's torments on the cross. This iconography, while not historically accurate, forms part of a 19th-century fascination with the Middle Ages.