An angel identified by an object

The cup is the whole identification here. The messenger at the Mount of Olives has no name and no rank in the source, so painting gave him an attribute instead, and this title puts the attribute where a name would go. That is how the tradition handles offices it cannot rank: the object carried becomes the description of the job. Two titles in this catalogue refer to that night.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1750 and gives Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, a Italian painter, with Rococo as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 79 x 90 cm. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded.

The suffering is in the title

It is worth noticing that the record's title interprets the object rather than merely naming it — not a cup, but the cup of suffering. Titles are evidence about reception, and this one carries an eighteenth-century reading of the episode into the catalogue. The style term on file is Rococo, which is not the register most readers associate with Gethsemane, and no location is recorded for the entry.