Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels

Two is the number for carrying

Six titles in this catalogue put angels with a dead Christ, and where they give a count it is usually two. That is not doctrine; it is mechanics. A body has two sides. An even pair can bear it symmetrically and a single figure cannot, and the tradition settled on the arrangement that works. It is one of the clearer cases in this catalogue of a number in a title that comes from the task rather than from any ranking of the host.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives Paolo Veronese, an Italian painter, filed under Mannerism Late Renaissance. It measures 110 x 94 cm, upright by the record's numbers. The measured colour family is brown — the commonest family here, carried by 88 of the 224 entries. No date of creation is recorded for this entry, so none is given; twenty-eight works on this site are undated. No location is recorded either, so no collection is named here.

Bearers, not mourners

The office is physical. Angels in this subject hold weight, and holding weight is not among the functions the nine orders describe — those are contemplation, governance and message-carrying. The scheme's lowest rank was assigned contact with human beings, and carrying a human body is the most literal reading that assignment ever received. Sixteen titles here name an archangel and not one of them is a bearer. The named ranks fight, announce and escort. The unnamed ones do the lifting.