The eagle, and the island

John the Evangelist is given an eagle. The symbol comes from the four-creature scheme that assigns a winged man to Matthew, a lion to Mark, an ox to Luke and the eagle to John, and it identifies him wherever it appears. A second sign is a place rather than a thing: Patmos, the island to which tradition sends him and on which the Book of Revelation is said to have been written. The title recorded here uses both — the name and the island — so the picture arrives already labelled.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the panel to 1485 and locates it at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Its dimensions are 63 x 43.3 cm, a small upright. The categories are broad: Religion and religious cultural heritage, mythology, and Fantasy. The style is Northern Renaissance, the nationality Dutch, and the measured colour families are ochre and green.

Why Fantasy sits in the categories

The Fantasy tag is a subject-index decision, and for a Revelation subject it is a reasonable one. The text this saint is associated with is composed of visions — beasts, signs in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun — and a catalogue that indexes what a picture depicts has to file such things somewhere. The eagle still identifies the man; the tag describes what he is looking at.