Angel collecting blood from the wounds of Christ

The narrowest office in the catalogue

Most angelic functions are broad — announce, guard, escort, attend. This title records one that is not: an angel collecting the blood from the wounds of Christ, usually with a chalice. It is a single, specific liturgical action, and an angel performing it is doing the work of a server at an altar rather than the work of a messenger.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1543 and gives Lorenzo Lotto, an Italian painter, with the style term High Renaissance. It measures 32 x 50 cm — among the smallest entries in this catalogue, at the scale of a panel meant to be looked at from close by, not across a church. The measured colour family is ochre. The recorded location is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Function without rank, again

The nine-order scheme has no order of acolytes. Angels who serve at the altar of a picture are, in every way the tradition can describe, the lowest rank — the one that touches the human world — and the fact that the office is liturgical rather than narrative does not raise it. What this small panel records is an angel doing a job with an object in its hands, which is the form nearly every memorable angel in Western art finally takes.