The painting, depicting the biblical New Testament event of the Flight into Egypt, was commissioned in 1603 by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini for the family chapel in his palace in Rome, later known as Palazzo Doria Pamphilj.

[2] For John Rupert Martin it is "the archetypal classical landscape, later to be emulated with variations by Domenichino, Poussin and Claude ... the small scale of the figures in relation to the spacious natural setting at once establishes a new priority in which landscape takes first place and history second";[3] though insofar as it is "new", that is for Italian painting, as such works had been common in Northern painting since Joachim Patinir began to use the same reversal of scale almost a century before.

[4] Wittkower sees in it "a heroic and aristocratic conception of Nature tamed and ennobled by the presence of man", as such works always contain a large man-made feature, here the castle "severely composed of horizontals and verticals" under which the party moves.

[5] Kenneth Clark mentions the work as an example of the "ideal landscape" driven to promote itself in the hierarchy of genres by emulating (in the absence of much evidence of what classical landscape painting was like) an essentially literary vision, largely derived from the pastoral poems of Virgil: "the features of which it is composed must be chosen from nature, as poetic diction is chosen from ordinary speech, for their elegance, their ancient associations, and their faculty of harmonious combination.

[6] Clark's praise of the work is noticeably faint, as it lacks the spirit he finds in Giorgione and Claude in the same tradition: "At their best, as in the lunettes in the Doria Gallery, Annibale Carracci's landscapes are admirable pieces of picture-making, in which agreeably stylized parts are built up into a harmonious whole.