FUGA IN EGITTO
Episode in the life of Jesus, occurring after the visit of the Magi and briefly narrated in Mt 2:13–15. Herod, enraged because the Magi had not returned to report on the king of the Jews, ordered the massacre of all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem and its vicinity.
FUGA IN EGITTO – *Giuseppe destutato dall'Angelo e fuga in Egitto*, mosaic of the early 13th century – Venice, Basilica of San Marco.
In the pulpit of the Siena Duomo, the subject was executed by Giovanni di Nicola; in that of Pistoia by Giovanni Pisano; and by Lorenzo Maitani in the reliefs on the façade of the Orvieto Duomo.
Yet it is in the Arena Chapel at Padua, among the frescoes painted there by Giotto at the beginning of the fourteenth century, that one may perhaps point to the most beautiful representation of the theme up to that time. The figures of Joseph, the Virgin holding the Child, the ass, and the Angel take on a new monumental quality. Squared off like the rocks of a bare landscape, these images structure the composition and heighten its spatial values.
The great Giottesque model, repeated also in the Lower Church at Assisi, was repeatedly taken up by fourteenth-century painters and was still recalled during the fifteenth century, when the new age’s naturalistic sensibility found expression in reducing the historical episode to a pleasant, almost secular idyll, as in the frescoes attributed to Peruzzi in Sant’Onofrio al Gianicolo in Rome. This narrative orientation was furthered by the addition to the Flight of the other episode of the *Rest during the Flight into Egypt*, with the consequent appearance of numerous, sometimes original variants.
Thus the episode narrated by the Evangelist was revived and enriched by the imagination of painters and sculptors, frequently also in German art of the late Gothic and Renaissance periods. It may be seen in a painting by Schongauer in the Museum of Vienna, in another by van Orley (1541) in Cologne, and in works by Lucas Cranach, Giovanni Saccheri, Jan Gossart, and others.
Among the sixteenth-century representations of the Flight and of the Rest, however, the finest are those left by Correggio in his pictures in the Uffizi, the Parma Gallery, and the Naples Gallery. We may also mention the compositions on this theme by Federico Barocci (Pinacoteca Vaticana and the Prado in Madrid), increasingly inclined toward an idyllic, secularized representation. This tendency decisively prevailed when, in the course of the seventeenth century, the episode became a pretext for Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and other great Italian and foreign painters to create fine landscapes with tiny figures. The art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not alter this orientation. – *See pl. CXXI.*