What survives of an altarpiece

The record calls this a fragment of a named altarpiece, and the fragment is an angel. That is the ordinary pattern rather than an accident: when an altarpiece is broken up, the panels that circulate separately are frequently the subordinate ones, because a central image is harder to detach from its identity than an attendant is. The title carries no rank and no name, only the category.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1500 and gives Raphael, a Italian painter, with High Renaissance as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 31 x 27 cm. The measured colour family is brown. The location on record is Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia, Italy.

Eight fragments and details

Eight of the 224 titles in this catalogue identify themselves as a detail or a fragment, and this is the only one of the four entries by this painter that does. Reporting that is useful for a reader deciding what an entry is: a fragment's recorded dimensions describe the surviving piece, not the object it came from, and its location is where the piece went. The recorded size here is small, and the location on file is in Brescia.