Christ Served by the Angels

The episode after the forty days

Matthew ends the temptation in the wilderness with a single sentence: the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him. That sentence is the whole of this subject. It is a coda rather than a confrontation, and painters treated it as a meal served in a desert, which is the only setting the text allows.

Where it falls in the cycle

Immediately after the baptism in the Jordan and the forty days that follow it, and immediately before the calling of the first disciples and the start of the teaching in Galilee. It closes the private phase of the ministry. Twenty-one titles in this catalogue name a baptism, the episode just before; the ministering angels appear far less often, because the moment has no drama in it.

The record

The catalogue gives Jacques Stella, 1650, and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. It measures 111 x 158 cm, horizontal, which suits a scene of figures gathered around a seated one. No style is entered in the tags; the artist is recorded as French. The subject fields class the work as a group composition and under religion. The measured palette reads as brown. The record says nothing about a patron or an earlier collection, so nothing of that is stated.