Virgin and Child with Four Angels

Counted, unnamed, positioned

Four angels, in a title that names the Virgin and the Child but gives the angels only a number. That asymmetry is the hierarchy written into a sentence: the individuals are identified, the attendants are enumerated. Thirty-seven of the 224 titles in this catalogue name the Virgin or the Madonna, and in almost all of them the angels arrive as a plural rather than as persons.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1515 and gives Gerard David, a Flemish painter, with Northern Renaissance as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 63.2 x 39.1 cm. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded.

Why a count is still information

A number is not nothing. Two attendants imply a symmetry around a centre; four imply a fuller court; a chorus implies architecture. The tradition used those counts as compositional grammar, and the catalogue preserves them because they were in the titles to begin with. What the record does not preserve — and what no honest entry can supply — is any account of what these four are doing, since the count is the only thing the title reports.