Angel playing violin statue

The violin-playing angel passed into Western iconography through the great paintings of Caravaggio — most memorably the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt," where the angel stands between Joseph and the sleeping Holy Family playing a long, gentle melody from a sheet of music. By the seventeenth century the violin had become the favourite stringed instrument of religious painters because of its capacity for the most plaintive melodic line. To imagine the heavenly choir at violin is to imagine paradise singing not in mass volume but in single, tender voices.