Angel sleeping left view statue

The sleeping angel is a distinctly Baroque and Romantic motif, beloved of nineteenth-century funerary sculpture and tenderly painted by artists from Caravaggio onward. In Caravaggio's "Rest on the Flight into Egypt," the angel plays the violin so softly that the Christ child sleeps in his mother's arms — and the angel himself seems on the edge of sleep. Sleeping angels suggest that even the celestial host knows rest, and that watchfulness in the religious imagination is not opposed to repose but contains it.