The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Cantarini painted this around 1640 for the nuns of Matris Domini in Bergamo, and then almost nobody saw it. The convent was out of the way and the canvas stayed there until French requisition took it in 1811. What travelled instead was his own etching of the same composition. He was a serious printmaker, and the plate carried the design to people who would never stand in front of the painting. He had left Guido Reni's workshop in Bologna a few years earlier and was about to go to Rome. The antique ruins behind the Holy Family are not scenery. The apocryphal account of the flight has the idols of Egypt breaking apart as the child passes through the country, and that collapse is what the broken stonework is there to show.