Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The Holy Family has stopped to rest on the road to Egypt, fleeing Herod's soldiers, and Gerard David turns the danger into a moment of complete calm. The young Virgin sits on a rock and holds out a bunch of white grapes to the child on her lap. The grapes are not simply a snack. To viewers in David's Bruges around 1513 they pointed to the wine of the Mass and to a crucifixion still far in the future. Far behind, small in a wide Flemish landscape, Joseph knocks chestnuts from a tree so the family will have something to eat. David was the leading painter in Bruges, and this kind of tender, domestic sacred picture proved popular enough that he and his workshop repeated it, letting the far distance melt into the soft blue that Netherlandish painters had made their specialty.