Even when he painted a moment of quiet, as in his Madonna di Loreto, there is something terribly moving about seeing Mary, so often depicted as nearly bodiless and lacking the true weight of the real, leaning against a wall, ankles crossed to rest a tired foot, supporting a Christ Child, who looks downright heavy and a bit too old to still be carried around, so that her holiness is suggested not so much by the peasants kneeling in supplication at her feet, but by something else, a sense of deep self-possession, emanating from the internal. The light falls on her for now, but behind her a darkness waits, and soon enough, we feel, she will have to go into it. Caravaggio simply knew something about the mysterious dynamics of how light always operates on two levels, on the surface of the visible and also within us, in the places we feel rapture, and a sense of survival, and of being alive. One can’t help but be drawn to his flame. But having said all that, I admit that I have never fallen in love with Caravaggio, no matter how many times he’s awed me. Love, and why we feel it for the artists we do, is harder to explain.

I was familiar with only a handful of Georges de La Tour’s works, and had never stopped to consider them deeply, but while in Paris a few months ago, I saw an ad for an exhibition of his work, From Shadow to Light, at the Musée Jacquemart-André, and felt a powerful desire to see it. It showed a detail of a painting in which a serene mother holds a newborn in the candlelit semidarkness, the baby’s shining forehead lit in such a way that one can’t say whether it is being illuminated, or whether the glow comes from within. I was struck by the light from the flame that radiates out of the dark in a manner that can be described only as personal, and the stillness captured that is also both external and internal, an indeterminate stillness that goes by the name of grace.

It was a bright fall day and the circular drive of the nineteenth-century mansion on Boulevard Haussmann was crowded, as were the period apartments of the Jacquemart-André, decked out in silks and tapestries. The entry to the exhibition itself was thronged, and the guard standing behind a velvet rope was letting people drip in a few at a time. Inside, the rooms were intimate, jammed, dim, and hushed. While I am aware that the stampedes of people attending exhibitions these days may be largely the consequence of Instagram and budget airlines, it’s nice to imagine instead that it’s because people in need of solace are turning to art for a bit of it—to paintings made four hundred years ago that have something to say about the nature of suffering and faith and their relationship to the consolations of beauty. The ones before us on the walls in the dim light seemed to be turned inward, possessed of a profound privacy, and I don’t think it’s too much to say that in the subdued rooms there was a feeling of reverence, as if what was being shared was not only La Tour’s vision, but his position toward all that he looked upon and tried to relate through oil paint, which could only be called devotion.

La Tour was born in Lorraine, a duchy of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1593, twenty-one years after Caravaggio, whose sensational combination of naturalism and theater, light and dark, formed him as a painter. La Tour, too, became famous during his lifetime—commissioned by the duke of Lorraine, Cardinal Richelieu, and King Louis XIII—but then was forgotten for centuries. He was rediscovered in the early twentieth century (the research and scholarship that have since been dedicated to piecing together and reconstructing his oeuvre have been called “the triumph and the justification of art history”), but our knowledge of La Tour still remains incomplete, and there are entire decades of his life about which nothing is known. It is speculated that he apprenticed under a master painter, and that he traveled to Italy, but there is no conclusive evidence. Only some forty works of his are known to have survived, and the inability to create any sort of accurate chronology required the curators of From Shadow to Light, which contains more than twenty of his paintings, to organize the exhibition thematically. Along with the gaps in knowledge, some deeper enigma about La Tour is preserved, which feels appropriate for an artist for whom silence, uncertainty, and restraint were central subjects.

Like Caravaggio, La Tour painted saints and martyrs as humble, ordinary figures. He lovingly rendered cracked, dirty nails, wrinkled faces, balding heads, and thinning, unkempt hair, locating holiness of the spirit in the most worn of earthly forms. The compassionate intimacy of his gaze gives a sense that he knew the saints and apostles personally; his grandfatherly St. Peter has the same recognizable features in each painting. La Tour gave up on daylight early in his career, and his preference became for the close interior lit by a candle with a flame the likes of which no one else has been able to paint, before or since: elongated, white-hot, and rising, sometimes with a dot of blue at the base, or no flame at all when it’s hidden by the hand that cups it, and through which its light pours. He developed the Tenebrism of Caravaggio into his own signature nocturne, lit only by candlelight or glowing embers, the background a brown wall for shadow play or, more often, a rich darkness of unknown depth. The space is empty but for the scene at hand, and often nothing is really happening there except a quiet stillness: a boy blowing on an ember, a woman lost in thought, a saint reading, always in a darkness that feels as if it were the middle of the night.

La femme à la puce (Woman Catching a Flea), c. 1635, by Georges de La Tour © Musée Lorrain, Nancy, France, and Thomas Clot. Courtesy Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris

In one of his better-known paintings, a plain-faced woman sits on a low wooden stool before a candle, chin tipped onto her chest, nightshirt open to reveal her breasts and swollen belly, knuckles and thumbs touching, perhaps to catch a flea, perhaps to pray for her unborn child. Painted by other hands, such a subject might have seemed voyeuristic, but La Tour elevates it to an act of witness. In some of his finest works, like Job Mocked by His Wife and The Newborn Child, the figures in their heavy clothes are reduced to flat shapes of ocher or brown, not unlike the way, three centuries later, Giorgio Morandi would commute vessels to a pure geometry stripped of all but color and feeling. Are we looking at a humble and anonymous mother and child, or the Virgin and Jesus? It doesn’t really matter, La Tour seems to say, and in fact it’s the wrong question. In the glow of candlelight or the compassion of a certain kind of attention, all enter equally into the sacred.

When one looks at La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint and candlelit quiet. This devotional context is not just part of what makes the paintings so moving, but what allows them to speak across four centuries to the question of attention. In today’s grief over the loss of it and the largely ineffective rallying cries to gain it back, the consequences are often measured by how much less we are able to learn or accomplish, but not as much is said about attention as a form of love, as perhaps the only means available to humans to elevate a person or a thing into the realm of the sacred, and how the loss of it strips us of the chance to bestow it. La Tour has something to tell us about true drama that Caravaggio doesn’t, really—about the way that it is not about drawing attention but about giving it, and how it unfolds not in the moment of action or at the apex of emotion, but in the stillness of looking so closely for so long, that it has the power to transform.

After I left the museum, out in the sun again, I was ecstatic, and, as always when I’ve experienced something that has turned me on, my mind became agile, and everything my eyes fell on—the handsome limestone buildings along Boulevard Haussmann, the leaves of the plane trees turning dry in autumn—brought pleasure. One of the gifts of leaving home for a while is that it renews the way one looks at things. The special light of the Mediterranean does something to me—it always has and it always will—but leaving La Tour and wandering through another foreign city, I found myself thinking about our year in Rome, which had come to an end, and how it’s possible that what I attributed to the light might better be described as the gift of attention—of having it restored to us in a way that allows us to really see, and not just with our eyes but with our spirit too, or more of it than we usually invite in during the busy distraction of common days.

Le nouveau-né (The Newborn Child), c. 1645, by Georges de La Tour © Musée des beaux-arts, Rennes, France. Courtesy Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris

On another unforgettable day in Rome last winter, my son and I walked through the park behind the Colosseum and entered a tunnel that took us underground to visit the remains of Nero’s palace, which, after his death in 68, was buried by Trajan in an effort to erase his memory and redirect Rome away from his tyranny and decadence. The once-splendid Domus Aurea, as the villa was called, had been built on the vast amount of land that Nero claimed for himself after the Great Fire destroyed nearly three quarters of Rome’s districts. When the opulent three-hundred-room Golden House and its extravagant gardens were complete, it is said, Nero proclaimed, “At last I can begin to live like a human being.” Trajan’s effort to erase the palace by burying it was, ironically, the very thing that saved it, and it was discovered again around 1480, supposedly by a boy who fell through a hole in its ceiling and described seeing painted caves. The extravagant rooms were so well preserved that artists like Michelangelo, Raphael, and Domenico Ghirlandaio followed him, dropping down into the palace with lit torches to learn from them. When my son and I visited, the site had only recently been reopened after an extensive restoration, and because it remains underground and the lighting is kept dim, it’s easy to imagine what those painters must have felt when they saw the paintings of such vivid color that they must have seemed almost alive in the dancing light of their torches. We often think of the Renaissance as a rediscovery of Greek and Roman thought and of the best of its humanism, but in fact, since time and history move in one direction only, it was less a rebirth than a relearning how to see. It’s something we seem to easily forget in our dark ages, both personal and historical, during those long periods in which we look but fail to attend to what we see, and forget that seeing, really seeing, is its own source of light.