Lying angel holds his head statue

An angel reclining with his head in his hands inherits the classical pose of melancholia — most famously studied by Albrecht Dürer in his 1514 engraving Melencolia I, where the winged figure of Genius sits with her face in her hand. Christian sculptors of the seventeenth century adapted this pose for funerary angels, transforming the philosophical melancholy of the Renaissance into the tender sorrow of celestial beings moved by human grief. The pose is one of the great inheritances of Western religious art: thoughtful, sad, and beautiful at once.