The Virgin and Child with an Angel, St. George and a Donor

Four kinds of being, in order

The title is a vertical section of the whole scheme. Christ and his mother at the top; an angel; a canonised human being; and a living person who paid for the picture and appears in it. Few entries in this catalogue name all four tiers at once. Where they do, the angel's position becomes legible without any argument about orders: above the saint, below the sacred pair, and the only figure in the list with neither a name nor a death date.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1480 and gives Hans Memling, filed as Flemish and Northern Renaissance. The measured colour family is brown. The recorded location is the National Gallery in London. No dimensions are recorded for this entry. Memling accounts for thirteen entries in this catalogue, more than any other artist here, and eight of them name a Virgin or a Madonna together with an angel.

The rung with no name

George has a legend, an attribute and a feast. The donor has a face and, in works of this type, a documented identity. The angel has a category. In the nine-order scheme it would sit far above both human figures; in the picture's own arrangement it sits between them — the ordinary result when a doctrine about proximity to God is translated into a composition about who stands where.