Picture a cherub. You almost certainly pictured a plump winged baby, cheeks flushed, floating near the bottom of a painting. Now read Ezekiel chapter one, where cherubim are described as having four faces — a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle — four wings, and human hands underneath them.
Those two things could not be further apart. Here is how one replaced the other.
The babies are not cherubim at all
The winged infants in Renaissance painting have their own name: putti, singular putto, from the Italian for small boy. They are not a Christian invention. They come from Greco-Roman art, where winged child figures appeared as Eros, as Cupid, and as decorative spirits.
When Italian artists rediscovered classical sculpture in the fifteenth century, the putto came back with it. Donatello carved them. Raphael painted them. They spread across European art as a convenient visual device for filling space and signalling the divine without much theological weight.
How the names got swapped
The confusion is partly linguistic and partly commercial.
Painters needed heavenly beings in religious commissions. Putti were already in the visual vocabulary, already easy to paint, and already read as celestial. Over time, viewers and then writers began calling them cherubs, because they appeared in sacred scenes and looked like the sort of thing an angel might be.
The most famous example is probably Raphael's Sistine Madonna, finished around 1512. The two bored-looking winged children resting at the bottom of the frame have been reproduced on greeting cards, mugs and wrapping paper for centuries. They are putti. They are not cherubim.
By the Baroque period the substitution was complete. A dictionary definition of cherub today will usually give you "a beautiful or innocent child" before it gives you anything from Ezekiel.
What cherubim actually are in scripture
They are guardians, and they are strange.
Cherubim are stationed at the entrance to Eden after the expulsion. Two are carved above the Ark of the Covenant, wings meeting over the mercy seat. Ezekiel sees four living creatures beside a whirlwind, each with four faces and four wings, moving without turning because whichever direction they travel, one face already looks that way. In chapter ten he identifies those creatures as cherubim.
Nothing in any of that is childlike. They are sentries and throne-bearers, positioned at boundaries that are not supposed to be crossed.
Why the sanitised version won
Partly because it is easier to look at. Partly because Western religious art had centuries of patrons who wanted beauty rather than dread. And partly because a four-faced creature is genuinely difficult to paint without it looking absurd — which is why so few artists tried.
The result is that the most commonly depicted angel in Western art is a figure that scripture never describes, while the one it describes in detail is almost never drawn.
Drawing the actual thing
Our Cherubim pieces are drawn from Ezekiel rather than from Raphael. Four faces, two sets of wings, and none of it softened. Each is hand-drawn by Olivia over several weeks and printed across the back of a washed heavyweight garment.
See the Cherubim hoodie or the Cherubim shirt.
If you want the wider picture, we wrote a longer piece on what biblically accurate angels actually look like, covering all nine orders and where the hierarchy comes from.
Read it yourself
Genesis 3 for the cherubim at Eden. Exodus 25 for the Ark. Ezekiel 1 and 10 for the four faces. It takes about ten minutes and it is stranger than any summary.