When one looks at [Georges] 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.

Nicole Krauss, “Out of Light”