Rest on the Flight into Egypt
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a subject in Christian art showing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus resting during their flight into Egypt. The Holy Family is normally shown in a landscape.[1]
The subject did not develop until the second half of the fourteenth century, though it was an "obvious step" from depictions of the "legend of the palm tree" where they pause to eat dates and rest; palm trees are often included.[2] It was a further elaboration of the long-standing traditions of incidents that embellished the story of the Flight into Egypt, which the New Testament merely says happened, without giving any details.[3]
The earliest known Rest is a panel in the large compartmented
The figures are often simply resting, but sometimes more definite camping or picnicking is shown, perhaps assisted by angels. In earlier pieces the Virgin is sometimes breastfeeding, connecting to the long-standing
Background
The single New Testament account, in Matthew 2:14, merely says (of Joseph): "When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt".[8] This account was embellished in various early New Testament apocrypha, which added various legendary incidents. Late medieval accounts continued to add detail, in particular the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, completed about 1374, just a few years before the time that the first artistic depiction of the Rest is found. This includes a description of Mary breastfeeding, which is found in Meister Bertram's Grabow Altarpiece, the first known painting.[9] Ludolph also mentions the journey passing "through dark and uninhabited forests, and by very long routes past rough and deserted places to Egypt",[10] setting the tone for the great majority of the landscape settings throughout the history of the depiction, though the trees usually clear sufficiently to allow a distant view.[11]
While the miraculous legends like the miracles of the palm tree, corn, and pagan statue all fell under the disapproval of the Church in the Counter-Reformation, and generally disappear from art, that the Holy Family must have broken their journey for rests was undeniable, so that the subject's legitimacy in scriptural terms was defensible. The subject also suited Counter-Reformation drives to promote down to earth realism into New Testament subjects, and to increase the role of Saint Joseph. It thus increased in popularity as the other accretions to the story reduced.[12] One of the legends, going back to the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (perhaps 7th-century), was that at the same time as the "miracle of the palm-tree" on the third day of the journey, a spring miraculously appeared when the travellers needed water, and the Rest is often set beside a spring or stream, though this can be regarded as natural.[13]
Development of compositions
The panel in the Grabow Altarpiece emphasises eating and drinking: Jesus is breastfeeding, the donkey drinking from a stream, and Joseph eating (probably bread) while offering Mary a bottle. Although the painting has a gold ground, this is one of the panels where landscape settings are painted around the edges. For about a century after this, depictions remain few. An altarpiece by Hans Memling (Louvre) marks the beginning of a sharp increase in depictions of the scene, and introduces the miracles to the background landscape,[15] though the composition, with a standing Virgin, is unusual.
In the decades around 1500 the Virgin and Child often dominate the composition in
Despite the fact that on the Flight itself Joseph is invariably shown on foot, leading the donkey on which Mary and the child are seated, in Rests,
The wider landscape of the Patinir in the
Untypical examples with specific activities include the famous Caravaggio, where Joseph holds the sheet music for an angel playing a viol; here both the Virgin and Child have fallen asleep.[23] The only piece of detail the gospel gives is that the flight began "at night", but landscape scenes at night were very rare in art in the first centuries of the subject. In a night scene by Rembrandt (1647, Dublin), the family seem to have joined some herdsmen with a big fire for the night; this is his only night landscape.[24] This relates to the painting of the Flight by Adam Elsheimer where they are just arriving at such an improvised encampment; Rembrandt would have known this from a print.[25] Two other unusual treatments from Dutch Golden Age painting are a realist scene showing the family in more or less contemporary dress in a run-down Dutch tavern or farmhouse by Abraham Bloemaert (1634, Rijksmuseum), and one with Joseph reading from a large book, no doubt religious, by Aert de Gelder (c. 1690, Boston).[26]
The subject is sometimes not easily distinguished from the Holy Family in Egypt, though the presence of the young John the Baptist, and a house nearby, suggest this, as the presence of the traditional ass or donkey suggests a Rest. In any case the "rest" was sometimes later interpreted to include the entire stay in Egypt, which according to the Golden Legend lasted seven years. A woodcut in Albrecht Dürer's series on the Life of the Virgin is always known as a Rest on the Flight, despite showing Joseph clearly well settled in Egypt, with a large house, and busy working on his carpentry, assisted by angels.[27]
In the same way, depictions of the Flight which include the miracle of the date palm approach being a Rest, as in the influential
General trends in landscape painting affect treatments of the subject. Like the Flight, it was popular with Joachim Patinir and his circle, who set the family amid extensive world landscapes. Maryan Ainsworth contrasts this group, centred on the outward-looking international trading-centre of Antwerp, with the paintings dominated by large figures of the Virgin and Child produced by Gerard David and his circle, based in Bruges, a city that had lost commercial pre-eminence and was now turning in on itself.[30]
18th-century depictions were often set beside classical ruins, and a few 19th-century ones featured Ancient Egyptian architecture. Some Romantic depictions placed the incident in lush paradisal settings, notably one that is "the first successful realization of Philipp Otto Runge's ambition to unite Christian orthodoxy with Romantic mysticism and his own personal cosmology",[31] or, less appreciatively, one where "he seeks to express the working of divine forces in nature in a vague, emotional manner".[32]
Examples
- Rest on the Flight into Egypt, by Titian, c. 1512, Longleat House, Wiltshire
- Correggio, c. 1520, Uffizi, Florence.
- , Strasbourg
- Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1597, by Caravaggio, Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome
- Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1630, by Anthony van Dyck, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
- The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1640s (?)[33] oil on copper, by Pier Francesco Mola, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c.1665,[34] by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Gallery
-
Meister Bertram von Minden, panel from the Grabow Altarpiece, c. 1379, the first known depiction
-
Fra Bartolomeo, 1500, an early Italian example, at the start of the popularity of the subject.
-
Follower of Joachim Patinir, c. 1515, main panel surrounded by smaller depictions of the life of Christ, National Museum of Western Art[35]
-
Abraham Bloemaert, 1632, Rijksmuseum
-
Luc-Olivier Merson, 1879. 19th-century historicism, MFA Boston
Notes
- ^ Schiller, 121–122; Hall, 124
- ^ Schiller, 121–122; on the miracle itself: 118–119, 121
- ^ Schiller, 117–122
- ^ Schiller, 122
- ^ Schiller, 122; Boston
- ^ Prado
- ^ Schiller, 122–123
- Authorized Version
- ^ Ainsworth, 308
- ^ Ainsworth, 308
- ^ David, 249
- ^ Hall, 124; Boston
- ^ Hand and Wolff, 64
- ISBN 1-85709-218-X
- ^ Prado
- ^ Hand and Wolff, 64–65; Washington page
- ^ David, 279–295
- ^ Schiller, 120–121; in the West, "variants are exceptions and are unimportant as far as the sense of the image is concerned" (p. 121).
- ^ British Museum page
- ^ British Museum page
- ^ Prado
- ISBN 978 1 902163 291
- ^ Schiller, 123
- ^ National Gallery of Ireland page
- ^ Slive, 77, 181
- ^ Boston page
- ^ Schiller, 123
- ^ Hutchison, 6; Shestack, #40. It was loosely copied by Albrecht Dürer, and closely by many others.
- ^ Shestack, #117, by Master BM, with four more grown-up singing angels (British Museum page. Another four assist Joseph in the Schongauer just mentioned, #40
- ^ David, 241–253, especially 252
- ^ German, 186
- ^ Schiller, 123
- ^ Metropolitan page
- ^ "Rest on the Flight into Egypt". Hermitage Museum. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
- ^ "Triptych: Rest on the Flight into Egypt - Joachim Patinir (follower of)". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
References
- ISBN 0870998706, 9780870998706, google books
- "Boston": Boston College, "Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight to Egypt"
- "David": ISBN 0870998773, 9780870998775, google books
- "German": German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, 1981, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Art Gallery of Ontario), ISBN 0870992635, 9780870992636, google books
- Hall, James, Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 1996 (2nd edn.), John Murray, ISBN 0719541476
- Hand, J.O. & Wolff, M., Early Netherlandish Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington (catalogue)/Cambridge UP, 1986, ISBN 0521340160
- Hutchison, Jane Campbell, in KL Spangeberg (ed), Six Centuries of Master Prints, Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, ISBN 0931537150
- "Prado": "Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Patinir, Joachim", Prado page
- Shestack, Alan; Fifteenth century Engravings of Northern Europe; 1967, National Gallery of Art, Washington (Catalogue), LOC 67-29080
- Schiller, Gertud, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. I, 1971 (English trans from German), Lund Humphries, London, ISBN 0853312702
- ISBN 0300074514
Further reading
- Schwartz, Sheila, The Iconography of the Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, 1983.