The Biblical story of the Flight into Egypt begins in Jerusalem. Certain wise men from the east had arrived there, asking, “Where is he that has been born, the king of the Jews? We have seen his star out in the east, and we have come to worship him”. Their question meshed with an earlier prophesy that just such a leader would arise, prompting King Herod, fearful of a new rival, to order that all male children born in the past two years be found and killed. Of course, the baby Jesus fitted this description.
Fortunately, however, an angel had given an early warning of the Massacre to Joseph in a dream. The angel told him, “Rise up, take thee the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt; there remain till I give thee word”. Joseph wasted no time. Over the centuries, such a dramatic episode was bound to attract many artists.
Normally the last event in the European Nativity cycle is the flight to Egypt, as described in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 2 verses 13-23. Once the three Magi had left Bethlehem to return to their eastern kingdoms, Joseph had a dream in which an angel appeared, warning him to flee to Egypt immediately, with Mary and their newborn infant Jesus. This was because King Herod would try to seek the child out in order to kill him, in what became the Massacre of the Innocents, which in the Catholic tradition is normally commemorated on 28 December.
Traditionally, the Flight came to be depicted with Mary and the child on a donkey, being led by Joseph.
Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517), The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with St. John the Baptist (c 1509), oil on panel
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Fra Bartolomeo’s The Rest on The Flight into Egypt from about 1500 is a traditional composition showing Mary and Joseph during their journey to Egypt. The more distant landscape is less detailed, but his donkey and palm trees are delightful. This was one of the last paintings which Baccio della Porta, as he still was at the time, made before he became a Dominican friar; he entered the monastery of San Marco the following year. When Fra Bartolomeo started painting again after 1504, it was only appropriate that he should return to the same motif. In this version from about 1509, he became one of the first artists to use an asymmetric variant of multiplex narrative which is more subtle, and may have been seen at the time as progressive. Joseph and Mary are shown in the dominant scene with the two infants. In the distance at the right is a couple, dressed identically, undertaking the same journey.
Tintoretto’s Flight into Egypt from about 1582 shows the Holy Family hiking their way through a lush valley, with tougher terrain in the distant hills. In the background, local peasants are fishing on the river, and there’s a small town behind their humble farm. In the far right foreground, a rough wooden cross is a poignant reminder of what was to come in Christ’s adult life.
Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594), The Flight into Egypt (c 1582), oil on canvas
Then at some time around 1600, Adam Elsheimer painted, in oil on copper, one of his most brilliant nocturnes, The Flight into Egypt. Under the soft light of a full moon, the Holy Family are about to enter a small camp of other refugees, set around a fire. Look closely and you’ll see a little echo of the Nativity itself, with ox, ass and sheep at the far left.
Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), The Flight into Egypt (date not known), oil on copper
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In 1609 the German artist Adam Elsheimer created his Flight into Egypt. Tiny as it was - it measures just 31 x 41 cm (about the size of an A4 sheet of paper) - it succeeded in portraying a familiar Bible story against an almost infinite vista of the night sky. It has been described as the first true moonlit scene, and the first naturalistic depiction of the night sky in Renaissance art [1]. The Flight was a painting that broke a number of traditions. It would come to have enormous influence on painters as illustrious as Rembrandt and Rubens. And, in its way, it even helped create a new way of looking at the world. Tragically, Elsheimer would die just a few months after completing his masterpiece.
It was found on the wall of his bedroom in Rome on his death in 1610 [2]. Elsheimer’s work broke with this tradition in a number of ways. Firstly, he set it in the deep night, a feature that was actually consistent with the Biblical account. Secondly, he depicted that night sky in an extraordinarily detailed and naturalistic way.
Let’s look at what’s happening in the painting. The Holy Family are on their way to Egypt by night. Mary and the child are astride a donkey, with Joseph close behind with a flaming torch. The fugitive family trudge around the edge of a moonlit lake to the apparent safety of a shepherd’s campfire in the woods. Above is a huge expanse of sky, with over a thousand individual stars.
Elsheimer has composed the painting very carefully. The scene is divided by the diagonal sweep of the Milky Way from the top left down towards the bottom right, which incidentally draws our attention to the Holy Family. This angle is reinforced by the line of the trees. At the same time, the painting also recedes from the foreground at left to the background at right, so the lowest point is also the furthest away [6].
The three clumps of trees also mark the three elements of the picture, which in themselves comprise separate genre scenes - the pastoral idyll of the shepherds, the family scene and the moonlit landscape [7]. In turn, each of those elements has its own source of light ~ the torch for the family, the campfire for the shepherds, and the moon, stars and reflections for the lake. These individual scenes are unified by the all-encompassing sky [8], and by the sparks which float upwards from the shepherds’ fire to seemingly join the stars in the Milky Way.
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As the work is painted on a smooth nonporous copper surface, the luminosity of the paint is intensified. Elsheimer also injects strong symbolic significance into the human actors in the painting. So, for example, the shepherds at the campfire are a reminder of the shepherds who followed the angel’s urging to travel to Bethlehem to witness Christ’s birth [10]. The constellation of Leo, traditionally associated with kingship and strength, is placed centrally over the Holy Family, and its brightest star (Regulus or Little King) is placed over the Christ child. The other main constellation, the Great Bear, is associated with Diana, goddess of the moon, chastity and virginity, all virtues that are also associated with Mary [11].
Elsheimer’s complex interweaving of these compositional and symbolic elements is designed to bridge the vastness of the sky with the domestic intimacy of the fleeing family, and to provide reassurance to the viewer that they are under divine guidance and protection. As we have mentioned, it was highly unusual for the scene to be set at night, despite the Biblical account. In fact, artists had struggled to achieve convincing depictions of night-time for centuries.
In view of this, the level of precision and detail evident in Elsheimer’s depiction of the heavens is particularly remarkable, and clearly indicates that the artist has studied the sky very closely. As Deborah Howard has pointed out, Elsheimer has carefully illustrated the irregular, cratered features on the surface of Moon and, for the first time, managed to resolve the Milky Way into myriads of individual stars. In addition, the relative positions of the stars in the constellations of Ursa Major (the Great Bear, Big Dipper and Plough) and of Leo are accurately represented, as is the prominence of the brightest star of Leo (Regulus). This is clearly not just a scattering of stars at random [14].
These features have prompted the belief that Elsheimer may even have painted the sky as it appeared on a particular night - reputedly, the sky over Rome on 16 June 1609 [15] - and, furthermore, that he did so with the aid of the newly-invented telescope which had been unveiled shortly before. There is considerable evidence for this, but some caution is warranted on both counts. Although, the relative positions of the constellations are accurate, their sizes seem to be much smaller than they would appear in the real sky. It can also be questioned whether the Milky Way, normally only detectable as a faint feature on dark clear nights, could be so clearly discerned when the moon is full and the sky is cloudy, as depicted in the painting [16].
As to the possible use of a telescope, Elsheimer was certainly interested in recent developments in this area, and mixed with the group of scholars congregated around Johann Faber (who became the executor of his estate), and the natural scientist Federico Cesi [17]. The basic idea of combining convex and concave lenses to produce a magnifying effect had been “in the air” in the early 1600s, and Hans Lippershey had (unsuccessfully) applied for a patent for a type of telescope in 1608. But while Elsheimer was creating his painting during 1609, Galileo was still in the process of improving magnification levels. He made his first observations of the Moon in November 1609 and observed the Milky Way and its resolution into stars over succeeding months, eventually publishing his findings in his Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610 [18].
Given this timeline, and the fact that Elsheimer was a notoriously slow painter, it seems a moot point whether he could actually have based his painting on a Galilean telescopic view, unless he had advance knowledge of Galileo’s work in progress. On Elsheimer’s death, Rubens lamented, “I have never felt my heart more profoundly pierced by grief than at this news… Surely, after such a loss our entire profession ought to clothe itself in mourning.... He had no equal in small figures, in landscapes, and in many other subjects" [20].
Elsheimer’s Flight was to have an influence out of all proportion to its size [21]. Its fame spread as result of the wide circulation of an engraving by Goudt (Elsheimer’s pupil and patron). Elsheimer’s new kind of composition -a low horizon and diagonals moving obliquely into background, had a major influence on landscape painting in Italy and Northern Europe [22]. The novelty of the moonlit setting influenced artists such as Claude Lorraine.
Philipp Otto Runge’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1805-06) is another unusual depiction of this story. The Holy Family are resting at dusk around a small fire tended by a dreamy-looking Joseph.
Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1805-06), oil on canvas
William Blake’s Virgin and Child in Egypt from 1810 is one of his unusual glue tempera paintings in which he achieves fine modelling of flesh.
William Blake (1757-1827), The Virgin and Child in Egypt (1810), tempera on canvas
Luc-Olivier Merson was skilled at taking traditional if not hackneyed stories and reinventing them in haunting images. His version of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1880) shows the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus at the foot of a sphinx, whose head is turned up to stare at its vast nighttime sky.
Luc-Olivier Merson (1846-1920), Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1880), oil
The Flight into Egypt has continued to interest artists right up to the present day, with their works often reflecting contemporary social, artistic or historical knowledge or concerns. So, for example, the incongruously European setting, so common in early works (including Elsheimer’s), gradually gave way to a rather more Egyptian-looking setting, for example in Poussin’s 1677 version. However, more geographically accurate depictions really began with the increasing awareness of Egypt that arose from archaeological discoveries, the spread of photography and the new interest in Orientalism.
More recently, the persecuted status of the fleeing family has evoked works based on current issues of homelessness and the refugee crisis.
Henry Ossawa Tanner's Depictions
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) also captured this scene. Here are some of his paintings:
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), The Flight into Egypt (c 1907), oil on canvas
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), Flight into Egypt (1923), oil on canvas
Tanner’s second version of the Flight into Egypt from 1923 is another nocturne following Elsheimer’s example, but sets a totally different scene in the narrow street of a town.
A History of African American Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner—The Flight into Egypt (1923)
In his Flight, Elsheimer introduced two novel aspects to a familiar theme. First, he depicted the scene at night. Second, he relied on a completely naturalistic, closely observed astronomically-consistent setting. In effect, the artist’s scientific realism lends credibility to the biblical account. This enabled him to do away with typical religious motifs such as haloes, angels or heavenly light, while at the same time imbuing the work with rich religious symbolism. His melding of religion, art and science is a particularly impressive achievement, particularly for such a small painting.
Like all good stories, the Flight into Egypt can be interpreted on a number of levels that can be elaborated far beyond the basic plot - issues of persecution, refuge, faith, inner dignity and even humanity’s place in the natural world.
