Product Description
6 November 2007 - Christmas Angels Smilers Sheet.
For the first time Royal Mail has made the airmail stamp available for personalisation through the Smilers service, and so the 78p value is included in this sheet, along side the 1st & 2nd class Angels stamps.
The sheet contains 8 each 2nd and 1st class stamps and 4 x 78p airmail rate stamps.
The Angels stamps feature illustrations by Italian illustrator Marco Ventura. He works in a style similar to those of Renaissance fresco painters drawing in pencil on gesso coated paper and then hand colouring the image.
Marco Ventura grew up with angels, son of a book illustrator, a Roman Catholic in Italy where angels flutter across the walls of every church. “Since I was a child I’ve been surrounded by images of Saints, Madonnas and flying angels with banners,” he said. He began as a teenager like any medieval apprentice, hand colouring his father’s pen and ink illustrations. His own work is traditional in technique, beginning with drawings in very hard pencil on paper prepared with a thin coat of gesso plaster. Angels bearing their messages of peace on earth spelled out in rippling banners are a common motif in Italian art from the Renaissance on. There were about 100 preparatory sketches, and originally a whole orchestra of angels - “angels playing music was I thought a nice combination and very appropriate for the Christmas theme” - before the final versions were selected. The horizon is at the same level in each so that the angels line up in the same landscape across the four stamps.
“When painting the Angels I liked the idea of them as neither female nor male, also I wanted them to be on the earth - not flying in the sky – as nice protective figures that please everyone with their music.”
