The Holy Family. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The Holy Family at Rest on the Flight into Egypt — Mary, Joseph, and the infant Christ pausing during their escape from Herod's massacre — appears in this 1614 canvas at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. The Rest on the Flight was among devotional painting's most humanised subjects: the divine family exhausted, the child sleeping, the parents watching in the shade of a tree or among Egyptian monuments. It invited tenderness without the theological formality of enthroned Madonnas or the violence of martyrdoms. Procaccini's 1614 version, from his Milanese mid-career, would have brought his characteristic warmth to this moment of vulnerability and intimacy. The Copenhagen museum assembled its Italian holdings through Scandinavian royal and later national collecting, preserving this canvas in northern Europe as representative of Lombard devotional painting's best period.

The Rest on the Flight typically employs a landscape or semi-outdoor setting that gives Procaccini opportunities for light effects unavailable in interior subjects. The sleeping or quietly alert child provides the composition's centre, with Mary and Joseph flanking in attitudes of protective watchfulness. Warm natural light supplements Procaccini's usual amber tonality with a more naturalistic quality.