The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist

This is an unusually gentle thing to have come from Caravaggio's hand. In the early 1600s he was the most talked-about and most volatile painter in Rome, better known for street brawls and dark public altarpieces than for tender family scenes. Yet here is a quiet Holy Family, about the closest he came to a private devotional Madonna. He painted it while paying close attention to his great rival Annibale Carracci, whose calmer, more classical manner was the fashionable alternative in the city. The canvas seems to have been sent off to France soon after it was finished, which is probably why none of Caravaggio's early biographers ever mention it. It hangs now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.