Rank made architectural

The title records a position before it records a subject: this is the crowning element of a polyptych, the panel sitting above everything else in the structure. In an altarpiece, height is meaning. Musician angels go on the step at the bottom; saints stand at the level of the enthroned figure; the pinnacle carries what the whole arrangement points at. An angel placed there is not attending anyone. It occupies the top of a built hierarchy, which is the closest painting comes to drawing the scheme rather than illustrating its errands.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1508 and gives Lorenzo Lotto, an Italian painter, filed under High Renaissance. It measures 80 x 80 cm — square, by the record's own numbers. The measured colour family is ochre. No location is recorded for this entry, so no collection is named here. Lotto accounts for six entries in this catalogue, and two of them are recorded as parts of larger altar structures rather than as independent pictures.

The Pietà without the mother

A Pietà is normally the mother holding the dead son. An Angel Pietà substitutes an angel for her, which is a change of category rather than of composition: the figure that grieves is no longer a person with a name and a relationship but an attendant with neither. This catalogue holds six further titles pairing angels with a dead Christ. In every one the angel does a mourner's work and is given none of a mourner's identity.