Angel Holding an Olive Branch

An angel who is only what he carries

No name, no rank, no scene, no companion — the title gives an angel and an object, and the object does all the identifying. The olive branch is a peace attribute with a long and public history, which is why a title can lean on it without explanation. This is the purest form of the catalogue's most common arrangement: an office implied by a held thing.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1480 and gives Hans Memling, a Flemish painter, with Northern Renaissance as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 15.7 x 10.1 cm. The measured colour family is yellow. The location on record is Louvre, Paris, France.

The smallest recorded size here

Of the 126 entries in this catalogue that carry dimensions, this one records the smallest area by a considerable margin. That matters for how the figure would have functioned: at this scale an angel is not an altar presence but a detail-sized panel, likely a fragment or a wing element. The record does not say which, and this entry will not guess. The recorded location is the Louvre, which holds eleven of the works gathered here.