Archangel Raphael with Tobias, St. Lawrence and the Donor Leonardo di Lorenzo Morelli

An archangel with a job and a passenger

The title of this entry lists four presences in order: the Archangel Raphael, Tobias, Saint Lawrence, and a donor given by name, Leonardo di Lorenzo Morelli. That order is itself a hierarchy. Raphael is a named archangel, an individual within the celestial ranks rather than a member of the chorus; Tobias is the boy he escorts through the Book of Tobit, the narrative that fixes how Raphael is drawn at all; Lawrence is a martyr; and the donor is a living man who paid to stand in the same frame.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1512 and gives Andrea del Sarto, an Italian painter, filed under High Renaissance. The recorded dimensions are 178 x 153 cm and the measured colour family is brown. The location is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The record also files the entry as a group portrait, which is a fair description of a picture whose title reads as a list of names.

What a named donor implies

Pictures that name their donor belong to a votive convention in which the holy figures are conventionally understood to present or protect the person who commissioned the image. That is a general convention of the type, not a claim about this canvas or about any arrangement in it. What the record supports is narrower and still useful: the archangel here is not decoration in a heaven but a participant in a scene with a named human being in it.