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."