Rest on Flight to Egypt

English

Rest on Flight to Egypt: Caravaggio

Price: Price on Request
Art Type: Oil Painting
Size:
English Comments: 0
International Comments: 0
Creating Date:
Introduction and Works of Caravaggio >>

Contemporary-Art.org

Reproduction

Enlarge

Caravaggio Oil Painting - Rest on Flight to Egypt

Keywords: Rest, Flight, Egypt

Work Overview: Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Italian: Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto
Artist Caravaggio
Year c. 1597
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 135.5 cm × 166.5 cm (53.3 in × 65.6 in)
Location Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome

Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1586 creation) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, like the Flight into Egypt, was a popular subject in art, but Caravaggio's composition, with an angel playing the viol to the Holy Family, is unusual.

The scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend, Joseph and Mary paused on the flight in a grove of trees; the Holy Child ordered the trees to bend down so that Joseph could take fruit from them, and then ordered a spring of water to gush forth from the roots so that his parents could quench their thirst. This basic story acquired many extra details during the centuries.

Caravaggio shows Mary asleep with the infant Jesus, while Joseph holds a manuscript for an angel who is playing a hymn to Mary on the viol.

The date of the painting is disputed. According to Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini, this painting and the Penitent Magdalene, together with an unidentified painting of Saint John the Evangelist, was done while Caravaggio was staying with Monsignor Fantino Petrignani, shortly after leaving the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari. This probably happened in January 1594.

However, there are problems with accepting Mancini's statement. To begin, none of these three works were listed in Petragnani's inventory of 1600, although it is possible that they could have been painted for another patron. More seriously, the painting has an obvious and direct compositional source in Annibale Carracci's Judgement of Hercules, which was completed early in 1596 and widely admired: the pose of Caravaggio's angel, for example, is closely based on that of Carracci's figure of Vice.[citation needed]

Annibale Carracci, The Judgement of Hercules, 1596. The sensuous figure of Vice in seems to have directly influenced the pose adopted for Caravaggio's angel.
While John Gash (2003) accepts Mancini's testimony, others, including Peter Robb and Helen Langdon (both 1998), have raised the possibility that it was painted for Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, who made Caravaggio in effect his household artist from about 1595 or 1596. The sophisticated treatment is appropriate for the cardinal's intellectual tastes and interests (the music held by Joseph is a motet by the Flemish composer Noel Bauldeweyn, with a text from the Song of Songs dedicated to the Madonna, Quam pulchra es, "How beautiful you are"), and it is unlikely that the artist would embark on a work like this other than as a direct commission.

This was the first large-scale work done by Caravaggio, and is compositionally more ambitious and more successful than The Musicians, of about 1595. It is also one of the very rare landscapes from this artist who seems always to have been painting in a prison cell, a room at a tavern, or at night - one critic has joked that all the sky in all Caravaggio's 80-odd works would add up to a few square centimeters of paint. The painting was apparently sold to the Pamphilj by the early 17th century. Caravaggio's Lombard and Venetian heritage are evident in the treatment of the landscape and in the luminous tonalities. Like most depictions of the flight to Egypt this is a peaceful moment, one in which the scenery is to be enjoyed, more gardenscape than landscape. The luminous figure of the adolescent angel, at once serene and sensuous, holds the centre of the group. The mother and child grouping, one of many that Caravaggio would paint, is comparable in its delicacy and realism to the best that the thousands in the canon can offer.

One of the great pastimes of Caravaggio scholars is identifying his models. Much progress has been made, but the following should be regarded as tentative only, as Caravaggio left few clues. Mary appears to be the same girl who appears as Mary Magdalen in the Penitent Magdalene of about 1597, also in the Doria-Pamphilj Gallery. The aged Joseph appears similar to the elderly saints in The Inspiration of Saint Matthew of 1602 and, less clearly, Saint Jerome in Meditation of about 1605. Some critics have identified the boy-angel with the ingenuous victim of cheats on the left of Cardsharps, while others have seen a similarity with the profile of the boy cheating him instead.

----------------------
The Council of Trent issued a number of decrees which prohibited artists from treating many popular legends which were now considered improbable. The story of the Holy Family's flight&emdash;only briefly sketched out in the Biblical account&emdash;survived the strictures of the Council and often appeared in painting from the end of the sixteenth century. Most favored was a representation of the holy family resting, wearing from their travels. Caravaggio's idyllic painting is an individualistic representation of this.

The artist ingeniously uses the figure of an angel playing the violin with his back to the viewer to divide the composition into two parts. On the right, before an autumnal river-front scene, we can see the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant in her left; on the left, a seated Joseph holding the musical score for the angel. Contrasting the unlikelihood of the event is the realistic effect of depiction, the accuracy of details, the trees, the leaves and stones, whereby the total impression becomes astonishingly authentic.

The statue-like figure of the angel, with a white robe draped around him, is like a charmingly shaped musical motif, and it provides the basic tone for the composition. It is an interesting contradiction&emdash;and at the same time a good example for the adaptability of forms.

There is no apparent precedence for a music-playing angel to make an appearance in the story of the flight into Egypt. Charming is Caravaggio's decision to actively involve St Joseph in the music-making.

------------------------
The composition fans out from an exquisite angel who is playing music. Joseph is wearing clothes of earth-color and is holding a book of music, from which the angel is playing a violin solo, whilst the donkey's large eyes peeps out from under the brown foliage.

The Angel is playing a motet in honour of the Madonna, Quam pulchra es..., composed by Noël Bauldewijn to the words of the Song of Songs (7,7) with the dialogue between Groom and Bride (understood in the painting not so much as Joseph and Mary, but as Jesus Christ and the Madonna, i.e. the church): "How fair and pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes." In the Gospel according to the pseudo-Matthew (20,1), significantly dedicated to the Flight into Egypt, the same metaphorical image of the palm tree laden with fruit returns.

The principal motif of Caravaggio's Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the Church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spiritual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens: "[it is the] Angel who spoke to me," says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is "the man dressed in linen," just as Caravaggio depicts him.

-------------------------
An angel has warned Joseph about Herod's plans to have his newborn son killed. The Holy Family flees into Egypt; here they are shown resting. Their means of transport, a donkey, watches them from the background.

The music that Joseph holds in his hands was written by Noel Bauldewijn in honor of Mary: Quam pulchra es, How beautiful you are (based on a verse in the Song of Songs). The heavenly atmosphere is strengthened by the fact that the violin is played by an angel.

Copyright Statement:
All the reproduction of any forms about this work unauthorized by Singing Palette including images, texts and so on will be deemed to be violating the Copyright Laws.
To cite this webpage, please link back here.

>> English Comments >> Chinese Comments >> French Comments >> German Comments >>Report

Caravaggio

Work Overview