Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Caravaggio)

Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1597 creation) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, like the Flight into Egypt, was a popular subject in art, but Caravaggio's composition, with an angel playing the viol to the Holy Family, is unusual.

Subject matter The scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend, Joseph and Mary paused on the flight in a grove of trees; the Holy Child ordered the trees to bend down so that Joseph could take fruit from them, and then ordered a spring of water to gush forth from the roots so that his parents could quench their thirst. This basic story acquired many extra details during the centuries.

Caravaggio shows Mary asleep with the infant Jesus, while Joseph holds a manuscript for an angel who is playing a hymn to Mary on the viol.

Style This was the first large-scale work done by Caravaggio, and is compositionally more ambitious and more successful than The Musicians, of about 1595. It is also one of the very rare landscapes from this artist who seems always to have been painting in a prison cell, a room at a tavern, or at night - one critic has joked that all the sky in all Caravaggio's 80-odd works would add up to a few square centimeters of paint. The painting was apparently sold to the Pamphilj by the early 17th century. Caravaggio's Lombard and Venetian heritage are evident in the treatment of the landscape and in the luminous tonalities. Like most depictions of the flight to Egypt this is a peaceful moment, one in which the scenery is to be enjoyed, more gardenscape than landscape. The luminous figure of the adolescent angel, at once serene and sensuous, holds the centre of the group. The mother and child grouping, one of many that Caravaggio would paint, is comparable in its delicacy and realism to the best that the thousands in the canon can offer.