Saint Joseph and the Christ Child

The child in blue is carrying his father's tools. The basket holds a saw and a plane, and the boy holds it up with both arms, the way a small assistant would. Joseph is not looking at him. He gazes upward with a hand on his chest, the pose painters used for a saint in the middle of a vision. The staff in his other hand has flowered, which is how the old story explained his marriage, his rod blossoming among those of the other suitors for Mary. What is striking to anyone who knows earlier pictures of Joseph is his age. Medieval painters had made him a bent old man off to one side. After the Council of Trent closed in 1563 the church wanted him taken seriously, and he is shown here as a man of about 40, dark-bearded and upright. The canvas was hanging in the Furriera, a service room of the new Royal Palace in Madrid, when the royal pictures were inventoried in 1747.