Elijah Fed by the Angel

The most domestic errand in the scheme

An angel brings a man bread and water while he sleeps under a tree. Nothing in the nine orders anticipates that. The scheme sorts angels by nearness to God and by kinds of governance; the lowest order was assigned contact with human beings, and this is what contact turned out to mean in practice — feeding somebody. Four entries in this catalogue record the episode, and none of them attaches a rank to the figure who does the feeding.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1578 and gives Tintoretto, an Italian painter, filed under Mannerism Late Renaissance. It measures 370 x 265 cm, which by the record's numbers puts it among the largest works on this site — wall-scale dimensions for a subject that consists of a meal. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded for this entry, so no collection is named here.

Scale against office

The mismatch recurs across the catalogue. Angelic subjects involving an errand are frequently painted at the largest scale the record holds, while the orders the doctrine placed highest — the contemplative ranks — produced no titles here at all. Not one of the 224 entries names a seraph or a cherub. The heaven that got painted very large is the heaven of deliveries.