Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Our gaze glides across the landscape like a bird’s in flight. Nature appears as a harmonious, divinely ordered arrangement of individual details, offering ever more insight.

The painting depicts the miraculous events surrounding the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.

The Bible tells how the Holy Family had travelled to Sotinen, and how, when they set foot in the Temple, the idols of the heathen gods fell to the floor. We see the temple on the left, set into the mass of rocky hills…

… and on the way to the sanctuary, a statue tumbling from its pillar.

One of the wonders along the journey is a miraculous harvest. Joachim Patinir (1475/80-1524) shows the freshly ploughed fields next to the ripe ones on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

The seeded fields miraculously ripened overnight and confused the soldiers chasing the Saints, whom the farmers told that the Holy Family had passed by as they were sowing the fields.

In Bethlehem, in the far distance, we also see Herod’s soldiers massacring the innocents.

The wailing mothers try desperately to protect their children.

The flowers and plants point to the deeper significance of the events: irises and thorny thistles foreshadow the Passion of Jesus.

Albrecht Dürer called Patinir the “great landscape painter”.

Patinir did not paint the Madonna in the foreground himself; he left that to an artist from Joos van Cleves’s workshop.

Indeed, Patinir's landscapes, in which the cosmic order is combined with the variously observed details of nature, became a model for artists of later generations, most notably Pieter Bruegel the Elder.