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Why This Symbol is One of the Most Compelling in Art
A trove of souls, justice and star signs
Take a moment to admire this extraordinary painting, in which the winged Archangel Michael appears at the centre of a landscape, bearing a pair of weighing scales. Made by the Netherlandish artist Hans Memling in about 1470, the altarpiece gives us a full panorama of the ultimate arbitration, turning the weighing of souls into a riot of both piety and wretchedness.
It is surely one of the most expressive and visually electrifying paintings of its kind.
Symmetrically positioned — acting as Christ’s assistant — Michael stands tall, gleaming in golden armour in his role as the leader of God’s army, his scales measuring good against bad.
Michael is not a giant; rather it was an artistic tradition to illustrate the souls in the form of diminutive human figures. Look closely and you can see the reflection of a landscape in his amour breastplate, a hint that the whole world will one day pass through his weighing pans.
This painting gives us just one example of the enormous range of scales in art. Across different cultures and employed in different contexts, scales have come to stand for the complex balancing act that constitutes so much of our lives — which is what makes them such a universal symbol.
Devil’s interference
One question implicitly posed by Memling’s painting is: how much does a soul weigh?
In the altarpiece, it is the virtuous spirit that tips the balance of the scales — rather than the flailing wrong-doer on the other side.
Yet when fellow Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden painted the same subject, it was the mass of the sinful soul that tilted the scales, whilst the more sincere soul rose upwards.
And so we discover that, in art, there is no consensus as to which is the heavier.
