Elia Cibato From angel

A title recorded mid-translation

The title as the catalogue holds it is part Italian and part English: Elia Cibato From angel. Elia is Elijah; cibato is fed. The subject is the prophet given bread and water by an angel, and this catalogue holds another entry by the same painter, under a fuller Italian form, of the same episode. Recording the string as received rather than tidying it is the correct choice for a catalogue, but it is worth saying what the string means, since a reader cannot be expected to reconstruct it.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1575 and gives Palma il Giovane, an Italian painter, filed under Mannerism Late Renaissance. The measured colour family is ochre. No location is recorded for this entry and no dimensions are recorded, so neither is stated here. Four entries on this site are filed under this painter.

The angel that has no name here either

Four entries in this catalogue record the Elijah episode, and none names the angel or gives it a rank. The tradition supplies neither. What it supplies is an errand — food carried to a man in a wilderness — and the errand belongs to the lowest of the nine orders, the one assigned contact with human beings. Sixteen titles on this site name an archangel. The angel who feeds a prophet is not among them, and the mangled title changes nothing about that: the figure was unranked before the words were garbled.