Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

The angel who does not announce

Nearly every angelic office in Western painting is directed outward at a human being: announce, guard, guide, console, punish, escort. The wrestling at the Jabbok is the exception, because there the angel is an opponent. Genesis never gives the figure a name or a rank, and the tradition has been careful not to invent one; he is a function without a place in the nine orders. Five titles in this catalogue turn on that episode.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1865 and gives Alexandre-Louis Leloir, a French painter, with Academicism and Neoclassicism as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour family is neutral. No location is recorded.

An anonymous adversary

The absence of a name matters more here than in a chorus scene. A crowd of unnamed angels is anonymous because it is a crowd. This angel is anonymous while alone and while acting, which is a different kind of gap and the reason the subject stayed useful to painters long after devotional demand for it had faded. The record files this entry under Cultural Heritage, Mythology and Fantasy rather than under religion.