The Flight into Egypt
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink on dark cream laid paper, laid down on laid paper, with pen and ink and gold ruled lines
- 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.)
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
drawings (visual works)inkpen and ink drawingslaid paperprints and drawingpaper
About
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 mountainsrecall 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.
