Vittore Carpaccio
The Flight into Egypt

This landscape format is painted with oil on wood. It is just over 70 centimetres high and over a metre wide. The painting is on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. 

In the foreground, Mary is depicted with the infant Jesus, riding on a donkey. The preceding Joseph is leading the animal by a rope to the right. The family is travelling through a hilly landscape with rivers. In the background, a barge can be seen on the water, rowing past a farmstead. The lush green meadows along the rivers are in bloom. Above the peaks on the horizon, the sky and clouds are bathed in the orange-coloured light of dawn, which looks like a firelight on a wooded hilltop on the right. 

A path bordered by small round stones runs along the lower edge of the picture. The donkey with mother and child are walking along it. Joseph is walking beside the path in ankle-high green. A halo hovers above Mary, the infant Jesus and Joseph. The group of figures occupies almost the entire width of the horizontal format. 

Maria, on the left of the picture, is sitting on the side of the brown-grey animal. She is wearing a red, gold-fringed dress, over which is a wide cloak of golden-blue brocade embroidered with plant motifs and cornucopias. The cloak covers her hair and conceals her body so that the contours of her arms and legs are barely visible. Mary looks pensively at her son. 

He is standing facing his mother on her thigh. She is supporting the approximately 2-year-old Jesus with her hands clasped behind her back. The child is dressed in a white linen robe. He is touching his mother's chin with his left hand and the index finger of his right is touching his own lower lip. The boy's gaze is directed at the onlookers. 

The advancing Joseph, on the right of the picture, holds the lead rope in his right hand and a chest-high walking stick in his left. He is wearing a knee-length blue long-sleeved robe with gold hems and a red coat knotted at the neck. His feet are in ankle-high black shoes. Joseph has light grey hair and a thick grey beard. He looks back at the donkey as he walks.

“Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt." 

The story according to the Gospel of Matthew ... In Carpaccio's painting, day is just dawning. Joseph, Mary, the baby Jesus and the donkey must have been on the road for hours. They're passing through a rolling landscape criss-crossed by rivers with boats on them. It's not unlike the countryside around Venice.

Carpaccio relies on that recognition effect. All the merchants who travelled to and from Venice over land or by water would probably have recognised the lagoon landscape. So he not only alludes to the everyday lives of his viewers, enhancing his work's appeal; he also shifts the biblical narrative into his own time. If the rescue of the infant Christ could have taken place literally on the doorstep, that makes it relevant to his contemporaries.

The priceless cloth of gold from which Mary's cloak is made may well be a reference to Carpaccio's home city. After all, many Venetian families had grown rich in the textile trade – specifically the trade in sumptuous fabrics.

We don't know who commissioned the painting, or where it originally hung. It was probably usedin a home for private devotions – perhaps by a wealthy merchant family.

“'Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.' And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt."

That's what it says in the Gospel of Matthew... In Carpaccio's picture it is already morning. Joseph, Mary, the baby Jesus and the donkey must have been on the road for hours. In the hilly landscape through which they walk there are many rivers on which boats float. The landscape looks like the area around Venice.

Carpaccio is relying on the recognition effect here: merchants who visited Venice would have recognized the landscape immediately. Carpaccio shows people something from their everyday lives. He brings the story from the Bible into their present day. This is intended to bring the story to life for the people of Carpaccio's time. The precious fabric of Mary's cloak could also be a reference to Venice; many families from Venice became rich through trading in fine fabrics.

Unfortunately, we no longer know anything about the person who commissioned the painting. We assume that the painting hung in a private household and was used for prayers at home – perhaps by a wealthy merchant family?