Support
Supporting Angel Oil Paintings
Free to read, funded by reproductions, one editor
This catalogue has no paywall, no account and no tracking script. It includes commercial links to hand-painted reproductions sold by its publisher, Art & See. Everything in it is free to read.
The reason to explain what that costs is that this particular subject eats an unusual amount of time before a single entry can be published.
Why this subject is slower than it looks
The word is unusable on its own
Matching titles for angels drags in evangelists, Michelangelo, Castel Sant'Angelo and a long tail of men called Angelo. Every exclusion rule has to be written, justified and checked against the collection so that it removes the fortress and keeps the archangel.
Rank is not in any database
No museum record says "seraph". It says "Angel" or it says nothing. Deciding whether a figure belongs to a rank means counting wings, reading colour and looking at where it sits in the composition.
The chorus is uncountable
A single Assumption can contain forty angels. Recording what an altarpiece shows without pretending to itemise every head in the upper third is a judgement call that has to be made picture by picture.
What helps
Buy a reproduction
Entries for public-domain works link to a hand-painted reproduction of the painting. Those links are this site's only income. There is no membership, no subscription and no donation form.
Correct an identification
A message naming an entry and saying which archangel it actually shows is worth more here than a payment. Corrections are applied and dated.
Nothing on this site needs an account and nothing needs cancelling. If it settled an argument about which archangel you were looking at, that is the whole intention.