The Flight into Egypt

Matthew's Gospel tells the Flight into Egypt in a few lines. An angel warns Joseph in a dream that King Herod is searching for the child to kill him, and Joseph rises in the night and takes the child and his mother to Egypt, where they stay until Herod is dead. Everything else in the long tradition of the subject, the journey and the rests along the road, grew from later legend.

Scarsellino painted this version in the first half of the 1590s, on a canvas about a metre high. It belonged to the Pio, a family with old roots in Emilia, lords of Carpi and Sassuolo until they lost those territories, who settled in Rome early in the 17th century. Their collection was especially rich in 16th-century Ferrarese painting, and this picture came to the Capitoline with the part of it acquired in 1750.