The office of comfort

The angel at Gethsemane has one of the narrowest jobs in the tradition: not to announce, not to rescue, not to judge, but to strengthen. Luke's single verse is the whole warrant, and the figure it produces is unnamed and unranked. The title of this entry states the office in a participle — comforting — which is as close as a catalogue heading gets to a job description.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1873 and gives Carl Bloch, filed as Danish, with no style term recorded. The recorded dimensions are 104 x 83 cm. The measured colour families are ochre and yellow. No location is recorded.

The same night, a different verb

Only two titles in this catalogue refer to that night, and the pair is instructive. This one names the angel by what he does for the man. The other, an eighteenth-century entry, names him by what he carries: the cup. Same episode, same unnamed messenger, two different accounts of what the office consists of. Neither picture is describable from the record, but the titles themselves are evidence of how the function was understood.