The title performs the hierarchy

This entry's title does something the catalogue rarely gets for free: it counts and it names. Four angels are counted and left anonymous; two archangels, Michael and Raphael, are named as individuals; two saints follow. That is the celestial hierarchy as painting actually used it — a chorus that is enumerated but not identified, and a small group of named archangels who have biographies, attributes and separate billing.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1485 and gives Domenico Ghirlandaio, an Italian painter, filed under Early Renaissance. The recorded dimensions are 200 x 190 cm — nearly square, at altarpiece scale — and the measured colour family is brown. The location is the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The record also files the entry as a group portrait alongside its religious categories.

Two archangels, two attributes

Michael and Raphael are distinguished in stable convention by different things. Michael's identity is martial: armour, a weapon, sometimes scales. Raphael's is narrative: he is the traveller's companion from the Book of Tobit, recognised by the boy, the fish and the dog rather than by anything he wears. A picture that includes both therefore has to work in two registers at once. The four unnamed angels have no such burden, and are free to be a chorus.