Landscape with the Flight into Egypt

In February 1598 Lucrezia d'Este died in Ferrara. She was the sister of the last Este duke, and the city was just passing to the pope. She left her paintings to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the pope's nephew, who had come to take possession of it. Her inventory of 1592 lists this small panel as the Madonna going into Egypt, by the hand of Civetta, the Italian nickname of the Flemish painter Herri met de Bles. By 1626 it was with the Aldobrandini family in Rome, by 1693 with the Borghese. Mary rides a donkey with Joseph beside her, small, near the bottom edge, and close by a stone idol breaks apart, as idols did wherever the Child passed in an old legend. The rest of the panel belongs to farm work, a ploughman, figures in a yellow field, villages with steep pointed roofs.