The Guardian Angel

A function, not an order

The guardian angel is the clearest case in this catalogue of an office that has no rank. The tradition's nine orders describe what angels are; guardianship describes what one is assigned to do — accompany a particular person. In the inherited scheme that work falls to the lowest order, the one whose whole business is contact with human beings, and the placement is not a demotion so much as a division of labour: the higher orders were said to contemplate, and contemplation produces no pictures.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1656 and gives Pietro da Cortona, an Italian painter, with the style term Baroque. It measures 225 x 143 cm — tall and at altar scale by the record's numbers — and the measured colour family is ochre. The recorded location is the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome. The record also files the entry under landscape alongside its religious categories.

The angel most people mean

Of every figure catalogued on this site, the guardian angel is the one furthest from doctrine and closest to use. It has no name, no attribute, no episode and no biography, and it is nonetheless the angel that devotional practice kept longest. A catalogue built on the nine orders has to record it as what it is: an unranked figure defined entirely by a relationship to somebody else.