An office nobody expects

Angels in this catalogue announce, attend, escort, console, guard, sing and weigh. Very rarely, they punish. The office named in this title is disciplinary, carried out by a plural and anonymous group, and it belongs to a hagiographic story rather than to scripture. It is worth isolating because it shows the range of the category: the same unranked, unnamed messengers who fill the upper register of an altarpiece can also be the agents of a scourging.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1639 and gives Francisco de Zurbaran, a Spanish painter, with Baroque as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 235 x 290 cm. The measured colour family is yellow. No location is recorded.

Scale and anonymity together

The recorded size puts this at altar scale rather than cabinet scale, which is the ordinary format for a saint's life presented to a congregation. The angels here get no names and no ranks in the title — only a definite article and a plural. That combination, monumental format and anonymous agents, is the standard way the tradition depicts a corrective act as coming from an office rather than from a person.