Paysage avec la Fuite en Égypte

By 1563 Bruegel had a powerful patron in Antwerp, Cardinal Granvelle, the man who effectively ran the Habsburg Netherlands for Spain, and this small panel was painted for him. Look for the holy family and you almost miss them: Mary and the infant Christ on a donkey, tiny, tucked into the lower left as the country falls away into a vast Alpine valley. Bruegel had crossed those mountains himself on the way back from Italy, and you can feel it in the distances here. On a dead tree at the edge stands a little roadside shrine, and its pagan idol is toppling out of it as the child passes. The panel is barely 37 centimetres tall. It later hung in the collection of Rubens, who owned a whole clutch of Bruegels.