The sustaining office

Elijah under the juniper is fed by an angel so that he can continue a journey. The office is neither announcement nor rescue but provision, and the source gives the messenger no name and no rank. Four of the 224 titles in this catalogue refer to Elijah, and the record keeps this one in its original Italian rather than translating it — a small editorial fact, but a real one.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1593 and gives Palma il Giovane, a Italian painter, with Mannerism Late Renaissance as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour family is yellow. The location on record is I Gesuiti (Church of Santa Maria Assunta), Venice, Italy.

A church, not a museum

The recorded location is a Venetian church rather than a gallery, which places the entry among the minority of works here still held where devotional pictures were meant to hang. That is a fact about custody, not about quality or authorship, and it is the only one the record supports. No dimensions are on file. This painter has four entries in the catalogue, and the offices named across them — sustaining, supporting a body — are among the least ranked in the collection.