The Archangels: The One Choir Painters Gave a Face

Of the nine ranks, painting gave a body to three, and the panel paintings that survive in oil narrow that to one. Seraphim are red and appear as heads inside six wings; cherubim are blue and usually reduced to a winged head. Both tend to occupy the border and the upper register rather than the centre, which is why a painting is rarely named after them — no work catalogued here is. Archangels are named: full figures, dressed and armed, the subject rather than the setting. Thrones, dominions, virtues, powers and principalities were named in sermons and inventories far more often than they were painted, and in this collection they are absent — which is itself the finding, not a gap in the catalogue.