The office instead of the name

Gabriel is the archangel of the Annunciation, and three entries in this catalogue are titled with almost exactly these words — the angel of the Annunciation — without naming him once. Seven titles here record an Annunciation and only two of them use the name. The substitution is precise rather than vague: an angel of the Annunciation is identified by the errand, which is how the tradition defines the archangels' office. The messages that matter are theirs.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives Guido Reni, an Italian painter, filed under Baroque. It measures 58.5 x 46.5 cm, upright and small. The measured colour family is brown. No date of creation is recorded for this entry — twenty-eight of the 224 works on this site are undated — and no location is recorded, so neither is stated here.

Half of a subject

An Annunciation is a two-figure encounter. A title naming only the angel describes half of it, which usually means the entry is either a fragment of a larger arrangement or one of a facing pair. The record does not say which and this page will not guess. What can be said is that isolating the messenger is the one arrangement in which an angel becomes the subject of its own picture rather than an attendant in somebody else's, and that this catalogue holds several such entries.