An Angel Appearing to the Wife of Manoah

Painters who took on the story of Samson usually reached for its blazing climax, the moment an angel rises into the flames of a burnt offering while a startled husband and wife look on. Saraceni, around 1610, chose the quiet scene that comes first. In the book of Judges a stranger finds the wife of Manoah alone in a field and tells her that she, long childless, will bear a son who will begin to free Israel from the Philistines. Scripture never gives the woman a name. Saraceni painted the encounter on copper, a small, smooth cabinet picture meant to be studied up close in a collector's room rather than seen across a church. It hangs in Basel today, catalogued as inventory 1112.