Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The holy family have stopped to rest on their way to Egypt, but you almost have to hunt for them, because the real subject here is the land. This small oak panel comes from the circle of Joachim Patinir, a Flemish painter of the early 1500s who did something genuinely new: he let the landscape swallow the story. Patinir built wide panoramic worlds seen from high up, blue distances melting toward the horizon, and set his sacred figures down small inside them. Painters and buyers loved it, and his manner spread fast through the Antwerp workshops, which is how a picture like this came to be made close to his lifetime by a follower rather than his own hand. Mary and the child rest in the foreground while the world opens out behind them. The panel is barely half a metre across, and it reached Basel from a local family foundation in 2015.