Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble group of Habakkuk and the Angel, carved around 1661 for the Chigi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, gives sculptural form to one of the most unusual miraculous transportation narratives in the deuterocanonical additions to the Book of Daniel.
The source is Daniel 14:33-39, found in the Greek Septuagint text but absent from the Hebrew Bible and therefore classified as deuterocanonical (Apocrypha) in Protestant traditions, while accepted as canonical by Catholics and Orthodox Christians. In this episode, the prophet Habakkuk has prepared a pot of stew and bread to take to field workers when an angel of the Lord appears and commands him to carry the food to Daniel in Babylon, where Daniel has been cast into the lion's den a second time. When Habakkuk protests that he has never seen Babylon and doesn't know the den, 'the angel of the Lord took him by the crown of his head and carried him by his hair; with the blast of his breath he set him down in Babylon, right over the den.'
Bernini's sculpture captures the precise moment of divine compulsion: the angel has seized Habakkuk by the hair and points urgently toward the unseen den of lions where Daniel awaits. Habakkuk, basket of food in hand, turns his head and gestures in mild protest or wonder - he is mid-action, caught between the ordinary world he was moving through and the miraculous intervention that is redirecting him. The angel's pointing arm and direct gaze create a line of energy that projects across the chapel toward its companion piece: Bernini's Daniel in the Lion's Den on the opposite side, the two sculptures in silent dialogue across the Chigi Chapel's space.
The Chigi Chapel was designed by Raphael at the beginning of the 16th century and left unfinished; Pope Alexander VII (born Fabio Chigi) commissioned Bernini to complete it in 1652. Bernini's addition of the two prophetic figures - Habakkuk and Daniel - gave the chapel a coherent Old Testament theological programme centered on divine protection and miraculous deliverance, themes appropriate to a funerary chapel in which the dead awaited resurrection.
The composition reveals Bernini's characteristic ability to find the most dramatic moment in a narrative and freeze it in marble. The seized-by-the-hair motif is unmistakably Baroque: dynamic, asymmetrical, full of implied motion. Yet the faces of both figures are rendered with psychological complexity - the angel purposeful and tender, Habakkuk confused but not afraid - that lifts the group beyond mere theatrical effect.
Santa Maria del Popolo is located in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, near the northern gate of the city. The Chigi Chapel is on the left side of the nave. Visitors can view both Bernini sculptures together with Raphael's architectural design and the famous Caravaggio paintings in the adjacent Cerasi Chapel, making the church one of the richest concentrations of sacred art in Rome.