Angels Entertaining the Holy Child

The least doctrinal office in the catalogue

Angels announce, guard, wrestle, weigh, expel, bear bodies and play music. In this title they entertain a child. No order in the inherited scheme covers it and no scriptural episode supplies it; the subject comes out of devotional habit rather than out of a text, which is exactly the kind of angelic function that flourished once the ranked heaven had stopped organising pictures. It works like the guardian angel — a single title in this catalogue — by defining the angel through its relation to a person, at which point the hierarchy becomes irrelevant.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1893 and gives Marianne Stokes, filed as Austrian, with the style term Art Nouveau Modern. The measured colour family is yellow. No location is recorded for this entry and no dimensions are recorded, so neither is stated here. The subject fields class the work as a group composition and as a religious subject. Five entries on this site carry Art Nouveau Modern as a style term.

Plural, and deliberately unranked

The title gives no number and no names, which by this point in the catalogue is the expected result. Sixteen of the 224 titles here name an archangel; every other angelic figure on this site arrives as a category. What the late nineteenth century added was not new ranks but new verbs — entertaining, ministering, accompanying — and a verb is what an angel is reduced to once the ladder it stood on has been taken away.