La Virgen con el Niño entre las Virtudes teologales y santos

Attributes that belong to ideas, not people

The title names three theological Virtues alongside a group of saints, and the two classes are identified by different systems. Saints are named by what happened to them: a wheel, a grill, a set of keys. Virtues are personifications, and their signs are allegorical conventions with no biography behind them — Faith with a chalice and a cross, Hope with an anchor, Charity with children. A picture that holds both is running two naming schemes at once, and only one of them refers to anyone who is supposed to have lived.

What the record holds

The catalogue keeps the title in Spanish, as La Virgen con el Niño entre las Virtudes teologales y santos, and this page reproduces it that way rather than translating a field the record has fixed. The work is dated 1669 and placed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The dimensions are 232 x 273 cm, wider than tall and large. It is filed under group portraiture, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

The saints the title does not name

The final word of the title is simply santos. Which saints they are is not recorded, and identifying them would mean reading the picture rather than the entry. The attributes would answer the question for anyone standing in front of it; the catalogue answers a different set of questions, and this page is limited to those.