Der Neugeborene

Georges de La Tour painted this around 1645 in Lorraine, a duchy that had spent the previous decade wrecked by the Thirty Years' War, by famine and by plague. Out of that came one of the calmest images imaginable. A woman holds a tightly swaddled infant while a second woman shields a candle with her hand. You never see the flame itself, only the warm light it throws across the baby's face and the reddened fingers cupped around it. Many read the pair as the Virgin and Saint Anne, the light standing in for a halo, though it works just as well as an ordinary birth in a dark room. Nothing moves. The whole picture is built from that single hidden candle and the few colours it can reach.