St. Joseph's Dream

Joseph has fallen asleep at his work. He sits with his cheek on his fist and his elbow on a plank, a saw hangs at the left edge, and a rough staff rests in his other hand. Behind him a young angel leans in and points away beyond the left side of the picture.

In Matthew's Gospel an angel comes to Joseph in his sleep more than once, first to tell him to take Mary as his wife and later to take the family and flee into Egypt, and Mengs leaves the message to the gesture. He painted it around 1773 or 1774, on an oak panel just over a metre high. It belonged to Pietro Leopoldo, grand duke of Tuscany, and hung among his pictures in the Pitti Palace in Florence before it entered the imperial gallery in Vienna in 1796.