San Giobbe Altarpiece - detail of Music Making Angels

An entry that is a fragment

The record is explicit that this describes a detail — the music-making angels of the San Giobbe Altarpiece — rather than the altarpiece entire. That matters for a catalogue organised by angelic function, because it means the entry is about a zone rather than a picture. In the sacra conversazione type, musician angels occupy a fixed position: the foot of the throne, below the Virgin and beneath the standing saints.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1480 and gives Giovanni Bellini, an Italian painter, filed under Early Renaissance. The measured colour family is brown. The recorded location is the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice. No dimensions are recorded, which is consistent with an entry describing a detail: the measurement that exists belongs to the whole panel, not to this part of it.

The lowest step of the composition

Position in these pictures is rank made visible. The Virgin sits highest, the named saints stand at her level, and the angels with instruments are placed lowest, on the step. The nine-order hierarchy would put musicians among the seraphim; the altarpiece puts them on the floor. This catalogue records what the pictures do, and what they do is treat the musical angel as the base of a structure rather than its summit.