Angel sleeps on a cloud statue

An angel asleep on a cloud is among the gentlest images Western religious art has produced — most beautifully realised in the painted cherubim of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, where two small angels lean on their elbows at the bottom of the frame, half awake, half dreaming. Cloud and sleep go together in this iconography: both are soft, indeterminate, suspended. The image suggests that paradise is not always work or watch — sometimes it is rest, on the most accommodating bed creation provides.