An altar named for a rank

Most entries in this catalogue are pictures of angels. This one is a picture organised around an angel: the record's title calls it an altar of the Archangel Michael, which means the dedication — the figure the altar exists to honour — is Michael himself rather than a saint or a scene from the life of Christ. Dedication is a different fact from depiction. It tells you who the object is addressed to, and in Michael's case it points at the militant office in the celestial hierarchy: the archangel invoked as protector and as the weigher at judgment.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1510 and gives Gerard David, filed as Flemish and Northern Renaissance. The recorded location is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the measured colour family is brown. The record carries no dimensions for this entry, so nothing here can be said about its scale — an altar of this description could be a single panel or a folding structure, and the catalogue does not settle which.

Archangel, singular

Michael belongs to the small group of angels the tradition treats as individuals with names and biographies, alongside Gabriel and Raphael. An altar can be dedicated to him for the same reason it can be dedicated to a saint, and cannot be dedicated to the anonymous ranks that fill the upper register of an altarpiece.