Ruhe auf der Flucht nach Ägypten

This is one of Caravaggio's earliest surviving paintings, made in Rome around 1597, before he became notorious, and it's gentler than almost anything he did later. The Holy Family has stopped to rest on the road to Egypt. Mary has fallen asleep with the child, and in the middle a young angel with dark wings stands playing a violin. Joseph, old and tired, holds up the sheet of music for him. That score is real. In 1983 someone identified it as a motet setting words from the Song of Songs, how beautiful you are. So we can, in a sense, know what the angel is playing. Behind the group the landscape opens into soft evening light, the kind of tender countryside Caravaggio would soon leave behind for figures pulled out of deep shadow.