Caravaggio (1573-1610) left an interesting interpretation of the flight into Egypt found in Matthew 2:13-15, influenced of course by apocryphal legends that imagined a peaceful rest during the arduous journey. Experience the profound beauty of history and artistry with our highest quality oil painting reproduction of “Rest during the Exodus from Egypt” by Caravaggio. This stunning piece captures the essence of the original masterpiece, showcasing exquisite detail and precision that will transport you to a moment of serene reflection amidst the tumult of the Exodus.
Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1597), housed in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj in Rome, is a testament to the artist’s innovative approach to religious art. Through its delicate realism, novel composition, and atmospheric style, the painting captures a serene yet poignant moment in the Holy Family’s journey.
Let’s approach the artist in our usual way: through passion for music, admiring in particular the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, or The Madonna goes into Egypt, as it was then called, a picture for a chamber, painted by a young Caravaggio around 1597 and kept in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome.
The oil on canvas painting, dateable 1596-99, measures approximately 53 by 66 inches. The Flight into Egypt has long been a favored subject in Christian art, often depicted as a dramatic escape or a moment of divine protection. However, Caravaggio’s interpretation is distinctly unique.
Composition and Symbolism
An angel with its back to us divides the scene into two parts. An angel, central to the composition, serenades the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus with a viol. On the left is Joseph, an elderly worker seated on a traveling bag, dressed in earth colors, accompanied by a donkey. At his feet is bare, rocky earth, a reminder of the slavery in Egypt. On the right is the Virgin, with Jesus in arm, yielding to the weariness of the journey and dozing along with the infant. She is fair and dressed in bright color, seated amidst verdure that recalls the promised land.
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The scene represented before us is the biblical story of the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, but Caravaggio hardly overemphasises the overtly religious theme. Accurate depiction of simple, earthly details blend with the spiritual realm, represented by the statuesque angel wrapped in a flowing robe. Divine music fills the human scene.
The scene before us, we would have to conclude, is most certainly not a scene set in the ‘reality’ of space. Indeed, why should it be? The spaces of the biblical narratives are surely as much celestial and psychological as they are earthly. The four figures that comprise this tableau are pushed so close to the picture plane, so close to the viewer that such questions of spatial unity lose their validity.
Despite the placidity of its mood, this is a complicated picture. The Holy Family sits in a row, countered by the projection of the angel's wings and by the recession of space into the distance. The painting is appealing and even slightly sentimental. Despite the epicene angel, it is without the psychological problems of Caravaggio's pictures of boys, or their ambiguity of meaning.
Caravaggio: Master Of Light
Biblical and Musical Context
In the Gospel Joseph regularly receives the most important messages from angels in his sleep. Here too, as Jesus and Mary sleeps, he holds the musical score from which the angel plays the violin. The piece shown is a motet “Quam pulchra es” by Franco-Flemish composer Noel Bauldewijn (c. 1480-1530).
What music comes from the violin? Not a generic lullaby that sweetens the dreams of the Madonna and Child, but a specific polyphonic choral composition with a sacred subject, which two historians recognized in 1983 in the score, read by the angel and held by the glorious patriarch, which doesn’t include the lyrics: Quam pulchra es, a motet composed around 1520 by the French-Flemish composer Noël Bauldewijn, which sings some verses of chapter 7 of the Song of Songs (F.T. Camiz a A. Ziino, Caravaggio: aspetti musicali e committenza, in Studi musicali 12, 1983, pp. 67-83).
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The biblical text is from Song of Songs, applied to Mary the Bride: How beautiful you are, how pleasing, my love, my delight (7:7). The whole canvas refers to the Song of Songs, the poem of Christ’s love for the Church, whose author, “employing comparisons from conjugal affection, describes symbolically the bonds of mutual love by which God and his chosen people are united to each other” (Pius XII, Haurietis aquas, May 15, 1956, n. 28). Caravaggio follows the teaching of Rupert of Deutz, a 12th-century Benedicine monk, who was the first to make a Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs, identifying the bride with Mary Most Holy.
We read in the first part of the text, of which Caravaggio paints the initial letter “Q” (Ct. 7): “Quam pulchra es et quam decora, / Assimilata es palmæ / et ubera tua botris. / Caput tuum ut Carmelus / collus tuus sicut turris eburnea”, “How beautiful you are, how fair! / Your very form resembles a date-palm, / and your breasts, clusters. / Your head rises upon you like Carmel; / your neck like a tower of ivory.” And the second part (12-13), of which the initial letter “V” is seen in the canvas, says: “Veni, dilecte mi, egrediamur; / si flores fructum parturierunt, / si floruerunt mala punica / tibi dabo ubera mea. Amen,” “Come, my lover, let us go out. / If the buds have opened, if the pomegranates have blossomed / will I give my love (literally: “I will give you my breasts.”).
Her red hair recalls the verse: Your hair is like draperies of purple (7:6); and her resting: I was sleeping, but my heart kept vigil (5:2). The Madonna’s red hair recalls Ct. 7:6: “your hair is like purple; a king is caught in its locks.” Our Lady’s sleep refers to Ct.
Caravaggio's Artistic Genius
The descent into Egypt prefigures Jesus’ self-emptying death on the cross, that will lead to his victorious resurrection. Caring for the Child who is divinity incarnate, Joseph and Mary are already associated with the paschal mystery in advance. They prefigure every Christian, called to share in the dying and rising of Christ.
People often like to call it Caravaggio’s only real landscape. Following an old North Italian tradition, Caravaggio conceived the subject as a kind of'fete champitre, a musical picnic. Giorgione and his successors. But the deserted and unfilled landscape is almost as different from Giorgione's well-tended park-like settings as it is from the harsh wastes of the Sinai Desert.
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Caravaggio’s harnessing of space throughout his career is a fascinating aspect of his art. From the almost claustrophobic denial of space in which to move in works such as the Rest on the Flight to Egypt and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew to the sheer excess of space, the dominance of the empty void in later works such as the Beheading of John the Baptist, spatiality in all its lack or excess plays a fundamentally constitutive role in our viewing experience.
The subtlety and beauty of these interactions display a side to the great artist all too frequently ignored. For those who accuse him of contributing little more to the history of art than shock value, a trip to the Doria-Pamphilj gallery in Rome should be obligatory.
Fascination with the life and work of Caravaggio seems to grow and grow, and thousands of pages of ink are spilled on him every passing year. The drama, violence and sensation of much of his oeuvre, in which it is so tantalising to see a reflection of his maverick life, will never fail to entertain us. The stunning Doria Pamphilj gallery is one of the Eternal City’s most impressive showcases for Caravaggio’s art, and is one of the key stops on our Caravaggio in Rome tour.
Michael Fried has claimed, and rightly so, that the angel facing into this picture is a surrogate for the artist himself facing his canvas. The angel who plays no part in the written narrative is Caravaggio's invention. What Fried does not know, though, is that music is an age-old metaphor in art for the making of art itself. So there are at least three different ways of deducing that the angel is the "artist": he is not part of the basic narrative, he plays music and he faces into the canvas in the same direction as the artist.
Fried also says that the over-large donkey's eye in the background functions like a convex mirror. It is indeed like the mirror in the center of Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait or Velazquez's Las Meninas, though Fried makes no reference to them.
It has often been noted that the model for the Virgin is also Caravaggio's Penitent Magdalene. Hers is thus a familiar face in his art like Victorine Meurend's in Edouard Manet's, the link made more meaningful by the discovery that the contour of her nose and nostril is an exact match with that in Caravaggio's presumed self-portrait elsewhere. She is the feminine half of the artist's mind. The meaning of Caravaggio's composition is obvious to those aware that every painter paints himself and even to eminent critics like Fried who think boldly and unconventionally. The Virgin's pose even recalls that of the Penitent Magdalene from a few years earlier (near left), the painting for which the same model is thought to have posed.
Together with St. Joseph, who, “secluded, shares in the divine love of the Spouses from another sphere and shows the score, which sings the praises of them” (M. Calvesi, Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto, in C. Strinati, Caravaggio, Skira, Milano 2010, pp. 39-40), let us too be kidnapped by so much beauty, by the text of the Song of Songs, and by the angel’s music.
Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt stands as a testament to his innovative genius and evolving style. The work exemplifies Caravaggio’s ability to bridge the sacred and the human, offering a glimpse into a moment of divine peace amidst the turbulence of the Holy Family’s journey.
The exact creation date of the painting remains a subject of scholarly debate. Giulio Mancini, a contemporary of Caravaggio, suggested it was painted around 1594. This painting marked a turning point in Caravaggio’s artistic journey. It was his first large-scale composition, surpassing the ambition and success of earlier works like The Musicians (c. Saint Joseph: Possibly the model for the elder figures in The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602) and Saint Jerome in Meditation (c. The sensual, reclining angel in Rest on the Flight into Egypt recalls the figure of Vice in Carracci’s Judgment of Hercules. Critics have humorously observed that across Caravaggio’s 80 surviving works, the combined depiction of skies amounts to mere inches of paint. Creation Date: c.
