The Flight into Egypt
Domenico Campagnola (Italian, c. 1500–1564)
c. 1540
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink on dark cream laid paper, laid down on laid paper, with pen and ink and gold ruled lines
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- Primary support: 18.7 × 25 cm (7 3/8 × 9 7/8 in.); Secondary support: 24.1 × 30.2 cm (9 1/2 × 11 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This sheet illustrates the Holy Family fleeing from King Herod into Egypt, a biblical story from the Gospel of Matthew. Like most of Campagnola’s drawings, the story provides little more than a cover for his primary interest: landscape. While the palm tree left of center signals the story’s North African location, the dense woods and distant mountains recall the artist’s native Italian countryside.
Campagnola played an important role in establishing landscape as a subject in European art and in the rise of drawings as collectible objects in and of themselves.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
