The Flight into Egypt
Close to us, a bearded, balding man leads a donkey carrying a woman and child to our right against a hilly landscape in this horizontal painting. All three people have pale, peachy skin and halos. The man has a gray beard and hair, and wears a royal-blue tunic under a ruby-red robe. He leans on a walking stick and looks back at the donkey. The woman riding the donkey wears a blue and gold brocade-like cloak covering her head and body. She has a straight nose, small pink lips, and she looks toward the infant she holds close to her body. The baby wears a white garment and reaches for the woman’s face with one hand as he turns to look over his shoulder toward us. The path they walk on is lined with grass and detailed plants. A river runs parallel to the path a short distance away. The horizon line comes about two-thirds of the way up the painting is lined with green trees, blue mountains, and a few buildings to our left. Wispy white clouds sweep across an azure-blue sky streaked with peach near the horizon.
Details
- Palette
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Select a color to find related artworks.
- Medium
- oil on panel
- Dimensions
- painted surface: 72 x 111 cm (28 3/8 x 43 11/16 in.) overall (including attached pieces): 74 x 113 cm (29 1/8 x 44 1/2 in.) framed: 122.9 x 160 cm (48 3/8 x 63 in.)
- Department
- CIS-R
- Holding institution
- National Gallery of Art
- Image provider
- national-gallery-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Andrew W. Mellon Collection
Art Genome Taxonomy
9 tags
Subject Matter
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Bible Story Both · 99%
The catalog title identifies the subject as “The Flight into Egypt,” and the image visibly depicts a haloed family group traveling through a landscape.
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Madonna and Child Both · 98%
The catalog and image show a woman holding an infant on a donkey; the child reaches toward the woman’s face, identifying the central maternal-and-child grouping in the context of the titled biblical scene.
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Animals Both · 99%
A donkey is clearly visible carrying the woman and child, while the bearded man leads it by its reins.
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Landscapes Both · 99%
The composition visibly presents a broad hilly landscape with a river, trees, vegetation, distant buildings, mountains, and sky, consistent with the catalog description.
Styles and Movements
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Renaissance Art Interpretive · 90%
The c. 1515 date and the painting’s haloed sacred figures, naturalistic landscape, and structured pictorial space support a Renaissance classification, although the supplied NGA metadata does not list a formal style attribution.
Visual Qualities
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Highly Detailed Visual · 98%
Fine detail is visible throughout the patterned brocade cloak, garments, animal tack, plants, stones, trees, buildings, riverbank, and distant terrain.
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Bright and Vivid Colors Visual · 96%
The painting uses saturated blue, red, gold, and green passages, strongly contrasted with the blue sky and warm peach-colored horizon.
Medium and Techniques
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Oil on Panel Metadata · 99%
The supplied catalog medium is explicitly “oil on panel.”
Time Periods
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16th Century Art Metadata · 99%
The National Gallery of Art dates the work to c. 1515, placing it in the sixteenth century.
Source & rights
Vittore Carpaccio. The Flight into Egypt. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.