Three names, and one description

The recorded title is a list, and the list is uneven. Three of its figures are named individuals — Peter Martyr, Nicholas of Bari, Benedict — and the fourth is given no name at all, only a job: an angel musician. That asymmetry is the ordinary grammar of the altarpiece. Saints are people with biographies, so they get names. Angels below the archangel level have no biography to attach a name to, so they get functions instead, and the function is what the title records.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1504 and gives Cima da Conegliano, an Italian painter, filed under High Renaissance. It measures 330 x 216 cm — upright, and by the record's numbers at the scale of a church picture rather than a gallery one. The measured colour family is brown. The recorded location is the Palazzo Brera in Milan. The record also files the entry under architecture, which in a work of this type usually means the throne and its setting are part of the subject.

Singular, not a chorus

Thirteen titles in this catalogue involve music, and most use the plural: concerts, choirs, bands of players. Here there is one. A single musician angel is not a reduced chorus but a different device — a chorus fills a heaven, a soloist occupies a step — and the step, in an altarpiece, is the lowest position in the arrangement.