Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1597 creation) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

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.