Flight into Egypt

FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. - Episode in the life of Jesus, which occurred after the visit of the Magi and is briefly narrated in Mt. 2:13. Herod, angered because the Magi had not returned to report news of the king of the Jews, gave orders to kill all the children under two years of age who were in Bethlehem and its surroundings.

But Jesus escaped him, because an angel appeared in a dream to Joseph, ordering him to take the Child and Mary and flee to Egypt.

Around this simple fact legend created a whole flowering of episodes, recounted by the apocryphal Gospels and which served as subject matter for Christian art.

I. ARCHAEOLOGY

The first time the Flight into Egypt appears in Christian art, one observes that the artist drew his inspiration from the narrative of the apocryphal Gospel "de nativitate Mariae et infantis Salvatoris" known as the Pseudo-Matthew (ch. 2.4), as can be seen in the triumphal arch of St. Mary Major. The child Christ, with a halo surmounted by the cross, is escorted by two winged and haloed angels, while Aphrodisius prepares to venerate him, having seen that at his appearance all the images of the idols had been shattered (J. P. Richter, Di un raro soggetto rappresentato nel mosaico della Basilica Liberiana, in Nuovo Bull. di arch. crist., 5 [1890], p. 137 ff.).

From the same apocryphal source the artists who depicted the scene in certain rock-cut churches of Cappadocia would later draw, as at Belikilisse, at Memabeykilisse, at Elmelykilisse and at Tokaly-kilisse and at Susam Bayry, near Urgub, where the falling to the ground of the images of the idols is represented, according to the narrative of the apocryphon.

In the early years of the 11th century the Flight is painted in St. Urban at the Caffarella: the Madonna with the Child is on the donkey, followed by St. Joseph.

In the 12th century the dream and the Flight into Egypt are depicted in the mosaics of the Palatine Chapel in Palermo. On the left is St. Joseph awakened by the angel; on the right he supports the Child on his left shoulder, while with his right hand he guides the donkey on which the Madonna is seated; a servant follows. The scene of the Flight into Egypt is also found in the crypt of St. Blaise, near Brindisi, which an inscription dates to the year 1197. At about the same date Benedetto Antelami sculpted the Flight in the baptistery of Parma. On the facade of St. Zeno in Verona the scene in relief was sculpted by a master Guglielmo: St. Joseph precedes with the staff on his shoulder, to which the small bundle is tied, and with his right hand he holds the rope to which the donkey is secured, on which the Madonna with the Child is seated (mid-12th century).

Enrico Jasi

II. ART

Widely developed during the Romanesque period and in the 14th century because of the narrative character of the representation, the theme was treated by Nicola Pisano in the pulpit of the cathedral of Siena, by Giovanni di Nicola in that of Pistoia, and by Lorenzo Maitani in the reliefs of the facade of the cathedral of Orvieto.

However, at the beginning of the 14th century it is in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, among the frescoes that Giotto painted there, that one can perhaps point to the most beautiful representation of the theme up to that time. The images of Joseph, of the Virgin with the Child in her arms, of the little donkey, of the Angel, take on a tone of new monumentality. Squared off like the rocks of the bare countryside, those images articulate the composition, heightening its values of space.

The great Giottesque model, repeated also in the lower church of Assisi, was several times kept in mind by 14th-century painters and was still recalled during the 15th century, when the naturalistic sense of the new age found a way to express itself by reducing the sacred episode to a pleasant narration of idyllic, almost profane tone, as later in the frescoes attributed to the Peruzzi in S. Onofrio on the Janiculum in Rome. To this orientation of the narration there also contributed the addition to the episode of the Flight of the other of the Rest during the flight into Egypt, with consequent numerous, at times original, variants.

Thus the episode narrated by the Evangelist returns, enlarged by the imagination of painters and sculptors, frequently also in the German art of the late Gothic period and of the Renaissance. It can be pointed to in a painting by Schongauer in the Museum of Vienna, in another by van Orley (1541) which is in Cologne, and in still others by Lucas Cranach, by Jan van Scorel, by Jan Gossart, etc.

However, among the 16th-century representations of the flight into Egypt and of the rest, the most beautiful are those left by Correggio in his paintings of the Uffizi, of the Gallery of Parma and of that of Naples. Also very noteworthy are the compositions on that theme by Federico Barocci (Vatican Pinacoteca and Prado Museum in Madrid), ever more inclined to an idyllic representation of profane taste. This decidedly took the upper hand when, in the course of the 17th century, the episode was a pretext for Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and other great Italian and foreign painters to paint beautiful landscapes with tiny figures. The art of the 18th and 19th centuries did not change that orientation. - See pl. CXXI.

Emilio Lavagnino