The angel who sounds

The figure named in this title has one instrument and one job. An angel of judgment is a trumpeting angel: the office is to signal the end, not to guard, guide or announce a birth. Placing such a figure beside a scholar-saint sets two time-scales against each other, the long labour of a desk and the single note that terminates it. The saint's own attributes belong to a different reading of this picture; what this entry records is the angel's function.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1626 and gives Jusepe de Ribera, a Spanish painter, with the style term Tenebrism. It measures 262 x 164 cm — large and vertical by the record's numbers — and the measured colour families are red and pink. The recorded location is the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples.

An office without a rank

The nine orders of the celestial hierarchy assign contemplation to the highest ranks and contact with human beings to the lowest, and nowhere in that scheme is there an order of trumpeters. The angel of judgment is defined by an act drawn from apocalyptic text rather than by a place in a doctrinal ladder. That is typical: painters worked from episodes, and the ranks that never appeared in an episode never acquired a face.