Regina Angelorum

A title about rank

Regina Angelorum — Queen of the Angels — is a devotional title of the Virgin, and it is unusual among the entries in this catalogue because it describes a relationship rather than a scene. Nothing happens in a title like that. What it states is a position: the whole angelic host, of whatever order, placed under a sovereign who is not herself an angel. For a catalogue organised by hierarchy, that is the clearest possible statement of where the ranks stand.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1900 and gives William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a French painter, with the style term Academicism. It measures 185 x 285 cm — large, and by the record's numbers wider than it is tall — and the measured colour family is yellow. The recorded location is the Petit Palais in Paris.

Angels at the end of the tradition

By 1900 the ranked heaven of the altarpieces had been out of working use for a long time, and an academic painter reaching for a Latin devotional title was reaching back deliberately. What the title does not do is specify which orders appear. It names the host as a whole and leaves it undifferentiated, which is exactly how the nine orders had functioned in practice for centuries: a doctrine invoked collectively and depicted generically.