An angel with no name and one task

Most of the angels in this catalogue are either named archangels or an anonymous chorus. This entry belongs to a third group: the single, unnamed angel of a Hebrew Bible episode, present for one act and gone afterwards. The title states the act exactly — the prophet Elijah receiving bread and water. Provisioning, not announcement; a servant's function rather than a messenger's.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1628 and gives Peter Paul Rubens, filed as Flemish with the style term Baroque. The measured colour family is yellow. The recorded location is the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne, France. The record carries no dimensions for this entry, so its scale is not established here.

Where it sits in the hierarchy

The nine-rank scheme of the celestial hierarchy has almost nothing to say about a figure like this one. Ranks were assigned by proximity to God — seraphim and cherubim at the top, plain angels at the bottom — and the bottom rank is the one that deals with people. An angel who brings food to a prophet in a wilderness is doing the lowest-ranked work in the entire system, and it is the work that produced most of the pictures.