Top 10 Beautiful Flight into Egypt Paintings

The Flight into Egypt is in Matthew 2. After the Magi leave, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to take the Child and His mother to Egypt, because King Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him. Matthew’s account of what Joseph did next is short:

So he got up, took the Child and His mother by night, and withdrew to Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”

Matthew 2:14–15 · BSB

That is all Matthew says about the journey. He names no animal, no route, no rest stop and no town in Egypt. The palm tree that bends down to feed Mary and the idols that fall when the Child arrives come from later legend, above all the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a Latin text written centuries after the Gospels. Painters borrowed freely from both, and knowing which is which makes the pictures more interesting, not less.

The story: Between 1303 and 1305 Giotto painted Mary, the infant Jesus and Joseph fleeing King Herod into Egypt on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the family chapel of its patron, Enrico Scrovegni.

When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up!” he said. “Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him.”

Matthew 2:13 · BSB

Matthew’s angel appears to Joseph in a dream. Giotto takes him out of the dream and puts him in the sky ahead of the family, and he gives the family four travelling companions; the chapel’s own description connects them to Pseudo-Matthew, where three boys walk with Joseph and a girl with Mary. The chapel’s curators also point out the geometry: the whole scene fits inside a pyramid drawn by the pale rock in the background, and Mary and the Child make a second, smaller one.

The man who paid for all this came with gossip attached. Dante put an unnamed Paduan moneylender in hell, recognisable only by the big blue sow on his little white purse, and tradition identifies him as Enrico’s father, Reginaldo. The chapel’s website files the old idea that Enrico built the chapel to atone for his father under tradition, and says recent studies point to a less dramatic story.

The story: In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus fleeing King Herod into Egypt as tiny travellers in a vast landscape of mountains and river, with a little pagan idol tumbling from a roadside shrine.

This is the burden against Egypt: Behold, the LORD rides on a swift cloud; He is coming to Egypt. The idols of Egypt will tremble before Him, and the hearts of the Egyptians will melt within them.

Isaiah 19:1 · BSB

First find the Holy Family, which takes a moment: they are small, and the world around them is enormous, on a panel only about 37 by 56 centimetres. Then look to the right of Mary for a tiny idol falling from a shrine on a dead tree, which the Courtauld reads as the end of pagan worship. The legend behind it is in Pseudo-Matthew, where every idol in an Egyptian temple falls on its face when the Child comes in, and the writer calls it the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy; Matthew himself never quotes that verse.

The panel’s later life is a collector’s fantasy. Rubens owned it (it is in the inventory of his estate made in 1640), and long afterwards, the Courtauld records, a retired admiral bought it at a country sale “for a few pounds.” It came to the Courtauld in 1978 with Count Antoine Seilern’s bequest.

The story: Federico Barocci painted the Holy Family resting on their flight from King Herod into Egypt under a cherry tree, with Joseph offering a branch of cherries to the young Jesus, for his friend Simonetto Anastagi of Perugia, to whom he sent it in 1573; it now hangs in the Vatican’s Pinacoteca.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters.

Psalm 23:2 · BSB

In the legend, a palm tree bends down at the Child’s command so the family can eat its fruit. Barocci replaced the palm with a cherry tree, and the Vatican Museums read the cherries as the blood of Christ’s Passion and the sweetness of Paradise. In Italian it is known as the Madonna delle ciliegie, the Madonna of the Cherries.

Barocci’s own story is less sweet. His seventeenth-century biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori reports a belief that jealous painters in Rome had poisoned his salad. Bellori does not vouch for the poison, but he is sure about the illness that followed, which, he says, left Barocci barely two hours a day for painting.

The story: Warned in a dream that King Herod wants the Child dead, Joseph takes Mary and the infant Jesus toward Egypt, and around 1597 Caravaggio, then a young painter working in Rome, imagined them resting on the road while an angel plays the violin from a score Joseph holds open.

I will lie down and sleep in peace, for You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4:8 · BSB

The music is real. The Galleria Doria Pamphilj, whose family has owned the painting since 1650, says the notes follow a motet written in 1519 by the Flemish composer Noël Bauldeweyn, on words from the Song of Songs and dedicated to the Virgin, so the angel serenades a sleeping Mary with a love poem from the Bible. Joseph, who has no spoken line anywhere in the four Gospels, has been given the job of music stand.

Caravaggio’s other Bible paintings, and the trouble he got into between them, are in our guide to Caravaggio’s Bible paintings.

The story: Fleeing King Herod by night, Joseph leads Mary and the infant Jesus toward Egypt under a full moon and a sky full of stars, painted in 1609 by the German painter Adam Elsheimer on a copper plate about 31 by 41 centimetres, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

He determines the number of the stars; He calls them each by name.

Psalm 147:4 · BSB

Elsheimer did not scatter random dots across the sky. The art historian John Rupert Martin pointed out a careful Milky Way, the constellations of the northern sky including the Great Bear, and a moon with dark patches instead of a flat disc. The Alte Pinakothek goes further and links the sky to the telescope observations of Galileo Galilei and Federico Cesi. Martin also admired how many separate lights Elsheimer fits into one small night, from the moon and its reflection to a fire on the left.

Elsheimer died the next year. His friend Rubens expressed deep grief in a letter, then added: “I pray that God will forgive Signor Adam his sin of sloth, by which he has deprived the world of the most beautiful things.”

The story: Resting on their flight from King Herod into Egypt, Joseph sleeps on a sack while Mary nurses the infant Jesus beside a crumbling wall, in Orazio Gentileschi’s painting of about 1615 to 1621 in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for bread to eat—for He gives sleep to His beloved.

Psalm 127:2 · BSB

No angel or miracle turns up here, just tired people and one donkey, whose head pops up over the broken wall like a neighbour’s. Birmingham’s catalogue files the painting under the keyword “Refugee,” which is a fair summary of Matthew 2. Gentileschi painted the composition more than once, and the versions in Paris and Vienna have no donkey at the wall; Birmingham bought this one in 1947.

The story: In the last years of his life, the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who died in Madrid in 1770, imagined the Holy Family’s flight from Herod into Egypt as a river crossing, with an angel punting their boat; the canvas is now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.

Hosea 11:1 · BSB

Look behind Mary: the donkey has come too, as a passenger, so for once in this list somebody else does the carrying. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns a related canvas, calls Tiepolo “the last great master to explore the theme” and says he painted four closely related Flight scenes at the very end of his life, now in New York, Stuttgart, Lisbon and at the Bellagio Center in Italy. They recall the twenty-four etchings of the Flight that his son Domenico had published in 1753; the subject ran in the family.

Matthew links the journey to Hosea, who was remembering the exodus: Israel, the people God called His son, had once been brought out of Egypt. Matthew sees that story beginning again in one child.

The story: After an angel warned Joseph that King Herod meant to kill the Child, Joseph took Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt, and in 1879 the Paris painter Luc-Olivier Merson imagined their night halt at the foot of a colossal sphinx.

You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the calamity that destroys at noon.

Psalm 91:5–6 · BSB

The brightest light in the picture comes from the Child, lighting Mary’s face and the sphinx’s stone chest, while Joseph lies by a small fire on the sand. According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns a related charcoal sketch, the composition was “tremendously popular at the 1879 Paris Salon.” Not bad for a man who, the same museum notes, “never traveled to North Africa.”

We looked at the light around the Child, in this painting and others, in Why Does Baby Jesus Glow in Nativity Paintings?

The story: Begun in Jerusalem around 1870 and finished only in 1903, William Holman Hunt’s first version of the Holy Family’s night flight from Bethlehem toward Egypt surrounds Joseph, Mary and the Child with the spirits of the boys Herod killed.

When Herod saw that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was filled with rage. Sending orders, he put to death all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, according to the time he had learned from the Magi.

Matthew 2:16 · BSB

Hunt’s idea was that the murdered children of Bethlehem travel with the family, alive and shining. Harvard Art Museums, which owns this canvas, calls it “the first of three versions of this unusual subject.” In a pamphlet for a later, larger version, Hunt explained the floating bubbles as images of “the Jewish belief in the millennium that is to follow the advent of the Messiah.”

This small canvas was the lucky one. When Hunt came back to Jerusalem, he found that “rain, moth, and rust had devastated the place” and his painting materials seriously damaged; the study for The Triumph of the Innocents, “having been packed away, had alone escaped injury.” The shining children are Hunt’s hope rather than Matthew’s report, and Matthew does not soften what Herod did. More of Hunt’s Bible paintings are in our William Holman Hunt guide.

The story: Warned in a dream that King Herod meant to kill the Child, Joseph took Mary and the infant Jesus by night toward Egypt, and in 1921 the American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner painted the two travellers riding through a deep blue night.

The LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.

Psalm 121:8 · BSB

Tanner, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, kept coming back to this subject. In 1909 he remembered “a ride one stormy Christmas night to Bethlehem,” when it took little imagination “to transpose the scene and see in each hurrying group a ‘Flight into Egypt.’” He had painted “four or five different versions” by then, he wrote, and “the ‘crop’ is not all harvested yet.” He was right: the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1991 catalogue counts more than fifteen. This one came twelve years after he wrote that, and here both travellers ride; in his 1899 version, Joseph walks.

His whole career, from Philadelphia to Paris, is in our guide to Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Bible paintings.

Ten was never going to be enough. Joachim Patinir’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt in the Prado sets Mary and the Child in a very wide landscape; Albrecht Dürer, visiting Antwerp in 1521, called Patinir “the good landscape painter” in his diary and went to his wedding. Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in Dublin, signed and dated 1647, is a night scene that John Rupert Martin thought was probably influenced by Hendrick Goudt’s engraving of Elsheimer’s picture above. Philipp Otto Runge painted the Rest twice, a small early version now in Munich and a larger canvas of 1805–06 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. And Fritz von Uhde’s 1908 catalogue lists eight Flights and Rests, one of which the German theologian Paul Keppler dismissed as a family expelled and hunted by the police, and probably, he added, with good reason; there is more in our guide to Fritz von Uhde’s Bible paintings.

Visio Divina, “divine seeing,” is a way of praying slowly with an image: a recent name for a very old habit. Try it with Elsheimer’s night sky or Tanner’s road.

1. Look. Give the painting a full minute before you read anything. Notice where the light is, and where your eye keeps going back.
2. Meditate. Read Matthew 2:13–15 slowly. Joseph is told to leave and to stay until he hears again; he is not told how long.
3. Pray. Bring to God whatever in your life feels like a journey at night: a move, a diagnosis, a child you are trying to protect.
4. Contemplate. The painters gave the family a rest that Matthew never mentions. Take one, and stay with the image without trying to get anything from it.

Where is the Flight into Egypt in the Bible?

Only Matthew tells it, in Matthew 2:13–23: an angel warns Joseph in a dream, he leaves by night with the Child and His mother, they stay in Egypt until Herod dies, and after further dreams they come back and settle in Nazareth. Luke does not mention Egypt. Matthew connects the story to Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called My Son” (Matthew 2:15).

Why did Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt?

Because the angel told Joseph that Herod was going to search for the Child to kill Him, and Herod went on to kill the boys of Bethlehem two years old and under. Egypt lay outside Herod’s kingdom, under its own Roman governor, and it had a large Jewish population; the Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, writing a generation later, claimed the Jews of Egypt numbered “not less than a million.”

How long did the Holy Family stay in Egypt?

The Bible does not say. Joseph stayed “until the death of Herod,” which most historians date to about 4 BC; when the family arrived, no one knows. A later legend, the Arabic Infancy Gospel, says they stayed three years.

What is the Rest on the Flight into Egypt?

It is a painting subject showing the Holy Family pausing on the journey. Matthew mentions no rest; painters took the idea from legend, above all the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, where Mary rests under a palm tree.

Why do Flight into Egypt paintings show a palm tree or falling idols?

The best-known written source for both is the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a later legend. In it the Child says, “O tree, bend your branches, and refresh my mother with your fruit,” and the palm bends down; later, in an Egyptian city the text calls Sotinen, every idol in the temple falls on its face when Mary carries the Child inside. Pseudo-Matthew, not Matthew, links the falling idols to Isaiah 19:1.

Did Mary ride a donkey to Egypt?

Matthew mentions no animal at all. Even Pseudo-Matthew speaks only of Mary’s “beast” among a whole caravan of animals; the donkey is a painters’ tradition, and a very durable one.

Where did the Holy Family go in Egypt?

Matthew names no place. Coptic Christians remember a long route through the Nile Delta, Cairo and Upper Egypt, and celebrate the Entry of the Lord into Egypt every year on 1 June; in 2022 UNESCO added Egypt’s festivals of the Holy Family’s journey to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Where can I see these paintings?

Giotto’s fresco is in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Bruegel’s panel at the Courtauld in London, Barocci’s canvas in the Vatican Pinacoteca, Caravaggio’s in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, Elsheimer’s in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Gentileschi’s in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Tiepolo’s in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, Merson’s in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Hunt’s at Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tanner’s in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

• Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua, history page and scene record “La fuga in Egitto”. History
• Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XVII, lines 64–75. Project Gutenberg
• The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Saviour, translated by Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 8 (1886). New Advent
• Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, exhibition text for Barocci: The Madonna of the Cherries (2025–26). Gallerie d’Italia
• Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), Life of Federico Barocci, p. 174. Internet Archive
• John Rupert Martin, Baroque (London, 1977), pp. 69, 224, 318–19.
• National Galleries of Scotland, “A spotlight on Adam Elsheimer”, quoting R. S. Magurn (ed.), The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (1955), p. 54. NGS
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Flight into Egypt, 2019.141.19, catalogue entry (adapted from Fahy 2005). The Met
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Luc-Olivier Merson, sketch related to Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 2018.74. Cleveland Museum of Art
• William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2 (London, 1905), pp. 316–17; and The Triumph of the Innocents (pamphlet, London, 1885), p. 4.
• Henry Ossawa Tanner, “The Story of an Artist’s Life: Recognition”, The World’s Work 18 (July 1909), p. 11774.
• Dewey F. Mosby, Darrel Sewell and Rae Alexander-Minter, Henry Ossawa Tanner (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1991), cat. 49.
• Albrecht Dürer, Records of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries, translated by Rudolf Tombo (Boston, 1913). Project Gutenberg
• Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 15.9.2 and 17.6.4, translated by William Whiston; Philo of Alexandria, Against Flaccus 43, translated by C. D. Yonge.
• UNESCO, “Festivals related to the Journey of the Holy family in Egypt” (inscribed 2022). UNESCO
• Finarte, Rome, Old Master Paintings and 19th Century Art, 25 November 2019, lot 282 (on the Gentileschi versions in Vienna and the Louvre). Finarte
• Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB).