Angel, from the polyptych of St. Nicolas of Tolentino

An angel cut loose from its structure

The title is a single word plus a note of where it came from: an angel, from a polyptych. Whatever rank or office this figure held inside the assembled altarpiece is not recoverable from the record, and the entry will not invent one. What can be said is that in a polyptych the angel is almost never the central panel, so an angel surviving alone is usually a subordinate element that outlived the arrangement it served.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1501 and gives Raphael, a Italian painter, with High Renaissance as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 58 x 36 cm. The measured colour family is brown. The location on record is Louvre, Paris, France.

A painter with an archangel's name

This painter shares his name with one of the three named archangels, which is one more reason a catalogue of this kind has to sort names from ranks before it does anything else. Four of the 224 works here are by him; six titles in the collection contain the word Raphael, and those two sets are not the same. The record places this panel in the Louvre, which holds eleven of the entries gathered here.