Angels

The barest title in the catalogue

One word, plural, no rank, no scene, no names. Almost every other entry in this collection tells you at least what the angels are doing or who they are with; this one tells you only that there is more than one. That reduction is itself the twentieth-century position on the subject: the hierarchy is gone, the narrative is gone, and what remains is a motif with a plural.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1924 and gives Giovanni Boldini, a Italian painter, with Impressionism as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 82 x 100 cm. The measured colour families are ochre and yellow. No location is recorded.

At the far end of the dates

The dated works in this catalogue run from 1270 to 1924, and this entry sits at the very end of that span. The subject tags are Abstract Art and Fantasy, with Impressionism as the style term — a combination that would have been unavailable to any of the altarpiece entries at the other end of the range. No location is recorded. What survives of a system of nine orders, by this date, is a word in the plural.