A counted chorus

The title enumerates: six angels around a Virgin in majesty. Counting is what Western painting does instead of ranking. None of the six is named, none is assigned an order in the nine-rank scheme, and the number is a compositional fact rather than a theological one — a throne needs to be flanked, and symmetry decides how many figures that takes.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1270 and gives Cimabue, an Italian painter, with the style term Byzantine. The recorded dimensions are 280 x 427 cm, which makes this one of the largest entries in this catalogue, and the measured colour family is brown. The recorded location is the Louvre in Paris.

Angels as architecture

In the majesty type, angels function structurally. They are conventionally arranged in symmetrical groups beside and above the throne, and their role is to define its space and mark it as a heavenly one — a job closer to that of columns than of characters. This is the oldest surviving use of the celestial host in Western painting and the one furthest from the individual archangels with names and biographies. It also shows why the nine orders never took hold pictorially: an arrangement built on symmetry has no use for nine distinguishable kinds of figure.