The opponent the text does not name

Genesis reports a night of wrestling with a man and does not call him an angel. Every title in this catalogue that records the episode does. Five of them exist here, and all five perform the same substitution, which is a clear demonstration of how a rank gets assigned by convention rather than by text: the figure had to be classified as something, painting had one category available for a being that is neither a man nor God, and that category absorbed him.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1893 and gives Maurice Denis, a French painter, with two style terms, Post-Impressionism and Symbolism. It measures 48 x 36 cm, small and upright. The measured colour families are yellow, green and blue. The recorded location is a private collection. The subject fields are worth noting: the record files the entry under landscape, forest and tree, and under colour, rather than under religion.

An unranked opponent

Whatever the wrestler is, he holds no place in the nine orders, because those orders were sorted by nearness to God and by contemplative office, and combat with a patriarch is neither. The catalogue keeps such figures apart from the archangels: unnamed, unranked, defined entirely by an action. This is the only one of them whose encounter is a contest rather than an errand.