The painting by Caravaggio we’ve been using to promote Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ contains an intriguing anachronism: the Holy Family, fleeing a murderous king Herod, has somehow acquired a violinist. An angel plays while Joseph holds the sheet music. Mary and Jesus sleep through the performance. The donkey looks on placidly.
Caravaggio painted Rest on the Flight into Egypt around 1597, and as you might guess, almost none of it is in the Bible.
The book of Matthew tells us Joseph was warned in a dream, packed up the family, and fled to Egypt. That’s it. No donkey, no rest stop, no angelic chamber music. For painters and artists (like Berlioz), this was practically a blank check.
And they cashed it. One of the apocryphal gospels supplied a miraculous palm tree that bent down to feed the travelers. Gerard David, painting in the Netherlands, substituted a chestnut tree. Pieter Bruegel was even less concerned with accuracy and implausibly relocated the entire episode to an imagined European alpine landscape.
Caravaggio’s contribution was more interesting for musicians. The sheet music Joseph holds is real: a Renaissance motet by Noel Bauldwijn, setting verses from the Song of Songs that include a reference to a palm tree. The miraculous tree of the old legend has been smuggled into the painting- this time as music. It’s an elaborate “Easter egg” for 1597.
Nearly three centuries later, Berlioz pulled a related stunt. He wrote part of L’enfance du Christ and passed it off as the work of a nonexistent seventeenth-century composer named Pierre Ducré. Caravaggio put old music into a new painting; Berlioz disguised new music as old.
Berlioz eventually expanded his composition into a complete telling of the Holy Family’s flight. In 1888, Henri Fantin-Latour made a lithograph inspired by the music. So: a painter put music into a picture, a composer turned the picture’s subject into music, and another painter turned the music back into a picture.
OSW presents the Symphonic Chorus in Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ November 15, 2026 at 2pm. Tell your friends.
