Angels as custodians

The title assigns a possession rather than an office: a treasure that belongs to angels, or is kept by them. Guardianship of an object is not one of the classical functions — the nine orders are described by proximity to the divine and by what they do, not by what they own — so this is a twentieth-century construction using an old vocabulary. The catalogue also holds the study for it, dated 1904.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1905 and gives Nicholas Roerich, a Russian painter, with Art Nouveau Modern as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 315 x 366 cm. The measured colour family is yellow. The location on record is Constantine Palace, Strelna, Russia.

Scale without an altar

The recorded dimensions put this among the largest works in the catalogue, at a size that in earlier entries would indicate an altarpiece. Here the location on record is a palace, not a church, and the subject tags are Abstract Art, Colors, Textures and Religion. That combination — monumental format, decorative tags, an angelic title with no scriptural episode behind it — is what the subject looks like once the hierarchy has stopped being a working system.