Abraham Receiving the Three Angels

Three visitors, counted

The episode named here is the visitation at Mamre, and what distinguishes it from every other angelic scene in this catalogue is arithmetic. There are three. The number is the subject: the title does not identify the visitors individually and the tradition never assigned them names, ranks or attributes. They are the clearest case in Western painting of angels functioning as a group without being a chorus — too few to fill a heaven, too many to be a messenger.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1667 and gives Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a Spanish painter, with the style term Baroque. The recorded dimensions are 236 x 261 cm — a large canvas, wider than it is tall by the record's own numbers — and the measured colour family is yellow. The location is the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Guests, not apparitions

The functional difference from the rest of this catalogue is that these angels are received. They are met, addressed and given a meal, which places the episode in the register of hospitality rather than revelation. That is why the subject survives into painting of the seventeenth century without any of the machinery an angelic vision usually needs — no clouds required, no rays, no hierarchy on display. Three figures arrive at a tent and are fed.