The Archangel Saint Michael, wearing a plumed helmet with the colors of Austria

A rank in national colours

The recorded title is unusually specific and unusually secular for an archangel: Michael, wearing a plumed helmet in the colours of Austria. The militant office is his — armour, a weapon, an adversary — but the tradition never assigned him a country. Heraldry did. Michael was adopted as a patron by cities, orders and states, and a title pairing the eighth rank of the celestial hierarchy with a national livery records that adoption rather than any doctrinal fact.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a French painter, with the style term Academicism. It measures 40.5 x 32 cm — small and upright. The measured colour family is ochre. No date of creation is recorded for this entry, so none is stated, and no location is recorded either, so no collection is named here. The subject fields class the work as male portraiture with no religious category at all, which is consistent with a title describing a costume.

Eight Michaels

Eight titles in this catalogue name Michael, more than for any other angel, and sixteen name an archangel of some kind. Michael is also the only one of the three named archangels this record shows in combat: two of the eight Michael titles name a battle or a defeat of Satan. That accumulation is the ordinary fate of the one member of the host painting could treat as a soldier. The rank stays where the doctrine put it, near the bottom of the scheme, while the equipment keeps growing.