The lily, and the tools

Joseph is given a flowering staff or a lily, from the tradition about how he was chosen, and a carpenter's kit — a saw, an axe, a square — from the trade the Gospels give him. A third sign is his age: the convention makes him markedly older than the Virgin, and that difference is itself an identifier. The subject named here belongs to a devotion that grew up around the last of those: his death, attended, became the model of a good death, which is why the picture is a bedside rather than a workshop.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1712 and gives the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under group portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style; the measured colour family is red.

A subject that needs a room

7 titles in this catalogue contain his name, and they divide between two settings: the holy family, where he stands at the edge with the lily, and the deathbed, where he is the centre and the objects are put away. In the second, the attribute that identifies him is almost entirely the company — a figure surrounded by attendants at the end. The record files this one as group portraiture, which is the same observation made in the language of an index.