About Angel Oil Paintings

The catalogue below sorts the originals by the ranks of the celestial hierarchy that painters actually gave a face to, and says plainly where a rank was never painted at all.

Nine orders, three faces

The hierarchy that Western art inherited has nine ranks in three triads, set out around the fifth century and repeated by every theologian who touched the subject afterwards. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. It is a tidy scheme and painters largely ignored it.

What actually got painted is much narrower. Seraphim became red and six-winged. Cherubim became blue, and then, in the seventeenth century, became infants. Archangels became named individuals in human form with attributes of their own. The middle triad — Dominions, Virtues, Powers — has almost no stable iconography at all: a viewer cannot pick a Virtue out of a crowded heaven, because painters never agreed on how one looks.

This catalogue is built on that gap. It records the ranks that were given a face, and it says plainly where a rank exists in the text and nowhere on a canvas.

Three individuals and a chorus

Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are not really members of a category. They have biographies, they carry fixed attributes, and each is attached to a scene that fixed how they are drawn: Michael in armour with the scales and the dragon underfoot, Gabriel kneeling with a lily, Raphael walking a boy home with a fish and a dog.

Everything else — the ranks of musicians filling the upper register of an altarpiece, the pair holding a crown over the Virgin, the heads and wings scattered across a ceiling — functions as a chorus, and the catalogue treats it that way. Grouping them together is not laziness; it reflects how the pictures were composed.

A word that hides inside other words

This subject has a technical problem that the others do not. "Angel" is a substring of several unrelated words, and any catalogue assembled by matching text will fill up with them. Of the works in the list this site began from that lacked the standalone word, thirty-three were evangelists, five were Michelangelo, and the remainder were Sant'Angelo, Castel Sant'Angelo, and various men named Angelo.

Matching therefore uses whole-word boundaries and a set of exclusions written out and justified one by one. A painter called Michelangelo is not an angel, and neither is a fortress in Rome.