Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Dream of Saint Joseph
Valentin de Boulogne French
Not on view
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream, urging him to take Mary and Jesus and flee into Egypt. In the seventeenth century, Joseph became a paradigm of the guardian-father. Here, Valentin employs touch to enhance the physicality of the figures. One scholar has alluded to the importance of the notion of God’s grace in such a picture, to "the heavenly apparition at the very moment when, incapable of rising to the truths of the Spirit, exhausted by the effort, man falls back in his torpor."
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
