Rest on the Flight to Egypt

Albrecht Altdorfer's Rest on the Flight to Egypt at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, painted around 1510, transforms the traditional Holy Family subject into an occasion for his revolutionary landscape painting — the sacred narrative almost subsumed by the spectacular fountain monument and visionary forest setting that dominate the composition. The painting is among the most extraordinary small-format works in German Renaissance art, the elaborate fountain with its putti and coats of arms providing an architectural counterpoint to the dense northern forest that surrounds it, while the Holy Family rests in quiet intimacy at its base. Altdorfer was the founder of the Danube School and the most innovative landscape painter of early sixteenth-century Germany, developing landscape as an autonomous expressive medium capable of conveying spiritual and emotional states independently of narrative content. The forest that fills this painting — its trees pressing in from every side, filtering an ethereal light from above — represents his most accomplished integration of sacred narrative with the visionary natural world that was his primary artistic concern. The Gemäldegalerie Berlin holds major examples of his small panel paintings.

The panel demonstrates Altdorfer's extraordinary integration of narrative and landscape, with the fantastical fountain and lush forest setting becoming as important as the sacred figures, rendered in his characteristically luminous and atmospheric style.