Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Late medieval accounts continued to add detail, in particular the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, completed about 1374, just a few years before the time that the first artistic depiction of the Rest is found.

[11] While the miraculous legends like the miracles of the palm tree, corn, and pagan statue all fell under the disapproval of the Church in the Counter-Reformation, and generally disappear from art, that the Holy Family must have broken their journey for rests was undeniable, so that the subject's legitimacy in scriptural terms was defensible.

An altarpiece by Hans Memling (Louvre) marks the beginning of a sharp increase in depictions of the scene, and introduces the miracles to the background landscape,[15] though the composition, with a standing Virgin, is unusual.

In the decades around 1500 the Virgin and Child often dominate the composition in Early Netherlandish paintings, with Joseph and the donkey in the middle distance, if they are visible at all.

In a Gerard David in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Joseph is seen in the background gathering food by beating a chestnut tree with a long stick, a detail probably borrowed from miniatures of the Labours of the Months in the calendars of books of hours, and perhaps a northern substitute for the dates in the legends.

[20] The wider landscape of the Patinir in the Prado allows space for depictions in the distance (at right) of the Massacre of the Innocents which provoked the flight, and the "miracle of the corn".

The falling pagan idols are shown both on the top of the temple at far left (though a statue of a rat-headed god is intact) and by the pair of metal feet on the sphere next to the Virgin.

[22] Untypical examples with specific activities include the famous Caravaggio, where Joseph holds the sheet music for an angel playing a viol; here both the Virgin and Child have fallen asleep.

A woodcut in Albrecht Dürer's series on the Life of the Virgin is always known as a Rest on the Flight, despite showing Joseph clearly well settled in Egypt, with a large house, and busy working on his carpentry, assisted by angels.

Maryan Ainsworth contrasts this group, centred on the outward-looking international trading-centre of Antwerp, with the paintings dominated by large figures of the Virgin and Child produced by Gerard David and his circle, based in Bruges, a city that had lost commercial pre-eminence and was now turning in on itself.

Some Romantic depictions placed the incident in lush paradisal settings, notably one that is "the first successful realization of Philipp Otto Runge's ambition to unite Christian orthodoxy with Romantic mysticism and his own personal cosmology",[31] or, less appreciatively, one where "he seeks to express the working of divine forces in nature in a vague, emotional manner".