The Virgin and Child Adored by Angels

The verb assigns the office

Adored by angels — the title puts the angels in the passive half of the sentence and gives them a single job. Adoration is the lowest and most widely distributed of the angelic offices in this catalogue: it requires no name, no rank, no attribute and no message, only presence and direction. It is what angels do when the title has nothing else to report about them.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1492 and gives Jean Hey, a French painter, with Northern Renaissance as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 29.5 x 38.5 cm. The measured colour family is red. The location on record is Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium.

A small panel with a landscape tag

The record's subject tags include Landscapes alongside the religious ones, which is unusual for an adoration entry and is the kind of detail a catalogue can pass on without interpreting. The recorded size is small. Thirty-seven of the 224 titles here name the Virgin or the Madonna, and the great majority of those give their angels a count or a verb rather than a name.