The Fall of the Rebel Angels

Four titles, identical, and one catalogue

This catalogue holds four entries called The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Nothing in the titles separates them. What separates them is the record: a different painter, a different date, a different measured palette, a different location field. That is worth stating on a site organised by hierarchy, because it is the same problem the doctrine has with the angels themselves — a class of items identical in name and distinguishable only by attached data.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates this entry to 1528 and gives Domenico Beccafumi, an Italian painter, filed under Mannerism Late Renaissance. The measured colour families are brown and yellow. No location is recorded for this entry and no dimensions are recorded, so neither is stated here. The subject fields class the work as a religious subject and as fantasy.

A fall the scheme cannot classify

The nine orders classify the host that remained. There is no rank for a fallen angel, because the fall removes exactly what a rank describes — a position and an office. That is why the falling figures in this subject are given no orders and no names in any of the four titles here: there is nothing left to assign. Nine entries in this catalogue involve a fall or a fallen figure, and not one of them names an order.