In the years that followed the Spanish Civil War, Ángel Ferrant worked partly by commission to make ends meet and try to offset the relative oblivion into which he fell in the first few decades of the Franco regime. Guardian Angel is a case in point. It was designed in 1954 for the side wall of the new Banco de España building in Barcelona, which opened some time later. The work still stands in the place for which it was made, on Avenida Portal del Ángel, set into a niche that breaks up the austere continuity of the granite rustication designed for the building by Juan de Zavala. Ferrant was closely linked to the Barcelona art scene from his days as a student at the La Lonja School. He submitted ideas without much success for several public tenders, including that for the sculptures decorating the nearby Plaza de Cataluña in the 1930s. In the 1940s he maintained close links with the new avant garde groups that emerged in the city, such as Dau al Set. It is therefore striking that this is one of only two works by him standing in public spaces in Barcelona. The other is the much later allegory called Textile Engineering (1961) in the Sarriá district. Its setting is high up, so it goes relatively unnoticed, but its symbolism and location give it a prominent place in the remote and recent history of the city.

The idea for the project came from the young Oriol Bohigas, based on a wish expressed by Eugenio d’Ors (who was born in this area of the city centre) to recover a long-lost angel that had stood on the medieval city wall. Parts of the north face of that wall ran close to the site now occupied by the bank building. Local place-names have reflected the idea of an angel since the 15th century: the street name Portal del Ángel harks back to one of the gates in the city wall, on the corner of what is now the Plaza de Cataluña square, where the bank's building stands. Ferrant's sculpture is the last thread (albeit conditioned by the context of the Franco dictatorship) in a legend that links the figure of an angel with the area outside the medieval city wall here. The story says that St Vicent Ferrer witnessed the apparition of an angel here during his visit to Barcelona in 1419. This led to the erection of a late-Gothic sculpture of an angel on the relevant panel of the city wall (now remembered only through photos). Popular religious sentiment in the city led to the figure being attributed protective powers against plagues and disease. It was taken down in 1859 and kept for a time at two different churches, but was eventually destroyed in the Civil War. Ferrant's commission to 'reinstate' the angel one hundred years after its removal can be seen in the context of the Francoist ethos of 'national Catholicism' as a sort of public expiation of the anti-clericalism that had been particularly strong in the city of Barcelona during the confrontations known as the Tragic Week in 1909 and later throughout the Civil War. Ferrant probably also saw the piece as a chance to redeem himself with the political establishment, given that his proven loyalty to the Republic and his participation in the committee set up to confiscate and protect works of art during the siege of Madrid had led to his being purged and having to give an account of his actions to the victorious rebels in April 1939.

Guardian Angel is a unique piece in the career of an artist who seldom agreed to tackle religious themes; his few other religious works include an early group representing the Wise Men in clay (1931) that is held by the Museo Reina Sofía, a figure of The Apostle St James for the mullion over the porch of the church dedicated to the saint in Orihuela (c. 1948) (this sculpture was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War), Altarpiece for St Francis for the School of Forestry Engineering in Madrid (1945) and Sacred Heart (1954). All these works were attributed great weight by the Spanish clergy of the time, who were seeking new forms of expression for outwardly renovated religious art. The Guardian Angel on the side wall of the Banco de España building reflects to some extent the totemic nature of much of Ferrant's output. It is made from three large blocks of limestone, for the legs, the torso and head and the wings, with two additional metal elements: the sword and the crown held in the figure's left hand. Ferrant has been accused of regressing to a more academic style, but this work is the result of a profound exploration of the medium based on more abstract assumptions. Its forms are blunt and rounded, with an air of noucentista nostalgia, and it complies with the theory of the combination of basic forms. It displays the sgraffito that characterises his works, which brings movement to a figure whose greatest problem is the height at which it stands, so that passers by have to look far up to see it. The angel's profile is markedly ambiguous, and its features seem more like those of a woman than a young man. It harks back faithfully to the traditional iconography of guardian angels that prevailed in the Kingdom of Aragon, where the 'fiery sword' of the Book of Genesis is supplemented by a crown. This is a uniquely local style. The rest of the features on the wall include pagan symbols (such as the torch of Mercury and cog wheels). They are set at the same height as references to the building's financial purpose, which places them somewhat at odds with the guardian angel in its shrine.

Carlos Martín