A grand list of references at site level says nothing about the altarpiece you have open. References here are attached per entry, linked, sitting beside the values they are supposed to support.
Where they exist, you can follow a value back to its record and stop trusting us at any point along the way.
Where they do not, the honest reading is that verification has not happened yet — not that it is being withheld. Most of this collection is in that state. An entry with no Sources section is a record we copied and have not confirmed.
Public data, machine-readable, open to anyone who wants to check it. Excluded, and never implied: unpublished archives, private letters, doctoral theses, subscription journals. Nobody is interviewed and no institution is a partner.
Which choir a figure belongs to; whether wings and a red robe make a seraph; whether the small winged child in the corner is a cherub or a putto borrowed from antiquity; which archangel is meant when the picture names none. The tradition that answers such questions runs from the Celestial Hierarchy through medieval commentary and modern iconographic scholarship, and this site reads none of it.
What an entry can tell you is what a museum wrote on the record. Where the museum names the angel, so do we. Where it says only that a figure has wings, that is where our knowledge stops.
When two records give a field two answers, the entry shows one answer and one source, and never sets them side by side. Sources are consulted in a fixed order and the first result is kept; the rest never reach the page. What you gain is visibility of whose figure you are reading, which is the precondition for checking it anywhere else.
Those paragraphs are drafted by a language model from the entry's own sources. They are not authoritative and should never appear in a bibliography as scholarship. Cite the underlying record for a fact; cite the entry, described for what it is, if you must quote our phrasing.
The argument for that separation is in the editorial policy.
A companion page for each work builds the reference in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard. Reach it from the citation link on any artwork page, at /cite/{artist}/{title}.
Two details matter while citing. The Master ID is permanent, so an entry remains the same object through any later correction of spelling or slug. And an entry showing a verification date gives you a real last-updated value for the reference; where none is shown, which is usual, fall back on your own access date.
For the site itself: Angel Oil Paintings, angelspaintings.com.
Report it to editorial@angelspaintings.com with the URL. Broken links, records that do not support what we say they support, and fields with no source at all are all worth an email — especially the last, because exposing that gap is what this page is for.
Correcting an entry against its source refreshes its verification date. No date at all means the entry has never been checked, which remains true of most of them.
