A concert of angels, filed as a still life

This is the strangest classification in the catalogue. The entry is recorded as a detail from the Concert of Angels, and the subject fields the record supplies are still life, photography and nature — with no religious category, no group category, and no mention of a figure at all. A detail cropped tightly enough stops containing angels, and the cataloguing follows the crop rather than the source. The result is an entry that belongs to a chorus of angels by title and to a table of objects by classification.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates this entry to 1515 and gives Matthias Grünewald, filed as German and Northern Renaissance. The measured colour families are ochre and yellow. No location is recorded for this entry, and no dimensions are recorded — expected for a detail, since the measurement on file belongs to the whole panel.

What a fragment does to rank

A hierarchy needs figures to rank. Remove them and nothing is left to sort, which is a useful demonstration of how thin the pictorial evidence for the nine orders always was. The scheme lived in texts. In pictures it survived as position, attribute and number: who stands higher, who carries what, how many there are. Take a close enough detail and all three vanish at once, and an angel becomes whatever object happened to fall inside the crop.