The Archangels
A Personal Series

Sacred Figures, Contemporary Eyes

The Archangels is a personal series of digital collages exploring what happens when sacred iconography meets high-fashion aesthetics. Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel — four figures shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — are reimagined not as devotional images but as mythical presences: powerful, elegant, and deliberately modern.

Each name appears in its three languages — Italian, Hebrew, Arabic — not as decoration but as a statement. These figures belong to no single tradition. They are universal.

Built by Hand

Every piece in this series is constructed entirely in Photoshop — photography, digital painting, texture layering, light design — without generative AI. The discipline is intentional: collage as a craft requires decisions at every layer, and that deliberateness shows in the final image.

The visual language draws from fashion photography and baroque composition simultaneously — dramatic drapery, cosmic backgrounds, golden halos reduced to geometric rings. Sacredness and modernity not in opposition, but in conversation.

Four Archangels

A Studio for Personal Research

The Archangels is part of Post-Anthropocene, Chiara Alduini's personal practice — a space for work that exists outside of client briefs, exploring fragmented visions of spirituality, identity, and the post-human condition through digital collage and photography.

Selected works from this series are available as fine art prints through the Post-Anthropocene shop on Fine Art America.

From Reference to Vision

Each archangel begins with two sources: a photographic study of a human figure — posed, lit, and selected for its gestural quality — and a reference from the Western iconographic tradition. The figure provides the body. The tradition provides the symbolic grammar. The collage is where the two worlds meet.

Guido Reni's Saint Michael Defeats Satan (1636) was the direct iconographic reference for Michael — the dynamic pose, the dragon underfoot, the red drapery as a symbol of divine power. The contemporary figure replaces the baroque angel, but the composition logic remains intact across four centuries.