Portrait of Saint Ambrose

The beehive

Ambrose is named by bees. The tradition attaches a swarm to his infancy, and painters render it as a hive standing beside a seated bishop — an attribute that has nothing to do with how he died, which makes it rare in a system dominated by instruments of execution. His other signs are institutional: a mitre, a book, and a scourge with three thongs. Where the wheel and the grill record a death, the hive records a story told about a beginning.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1639 and gives the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Rennes, France as its location. The dimensions are 110 x 130 cm, slightly wider than tall. It is filed under male portraiture, with Baroque as the style and Dutch as the nationality; the measured colour family is yellow.

A portrait of someone unavailable to sit

The title is worth reading literally: it calls the work a portrait, and the subject died more than a millennium before the date on the entry. That is a normal usage in this catalogue and it is also a precise description of what the attribute system does. A portrait of a saint is not a likeness; it is an assembly of agreed signs that a viewer reads as a person. 3 titles here carry his name, and no two of the pictures behind them need to have resembled each other for all three to be recognisable.