Christ Wearing the Crown of Thorns, Supported by Angels

Supporting a living body

The verb is the one used for the dead Christ subjects, but the body here is alive. That changes what the angels are doing. Supporting a corpse is care after the fact; supporting a man wearing the crown of thorns is intervention during the event, which the narrative itself does not describe. The subject belongs to the devotional images built out of the Passion rather than to its sequence, and the angels in it perform a service the tradition assigns to no order.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1587 and gives Annibale Carracci, an Italian painter, filed under Baroque. It measures 85 x 100 cm, slightly wider than tall by the record's numbers. The measured colour families are brown and yellow. No location is recorded for this entry — the field is empty, as it is for 105 of the 224 works on this site — so no collection is named here.

Function without an order, again

This is the recurring finding of a catalogue arranged by hierarchy. The nine orders describe a heaven; the pictures describe work. Where the two meet, the work usually has no rank attached: bearers, attendants, musicians, escorts, consolers. Sixteen titles here name an archangel, and those are the entries where doctrine and image agree. In the rest the angel is identified by a verb, and this entry's verb is supported.