Who adores whom

The title is grammatically ambiguous and the record does not resolve it. The Adoration of Angels can mean angels performing adoration or angels receiving it, and the two readings sit at opposite ends of the hierarchy. Adoration directed at God is the office of the highest orders. Adoration directed at angels is, in the tradition, an error — the scheme exists partly to make clear that the host serves and is not served. The first reading is almost certainly intended, and this page notes the ambiguity rather than pretending the title settles it.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1751 and gives Charles-Andre van Loo, filed as French, with the style term Rococo. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded for this entry and no dimensions are recorded, so neither is stated here. The record enters the artist under both his formal name and the shorter form Carle van Loo.

The thinnest century in the catalogue

Of the 224 works here, only six are dated to the eighteenth century, against 55 for the sixteenth and 54 for the nineteenth. The angel did not disappear in that interval, but the altarpiece did, and with it the structures that made rank visible — pinnacles, tiers, the step at the foot of a throne. What an eighteenth-century angelic subject usually offers instead is a title like this one: a devotional act with no architecture around it to say who is above whom.