La Sacra Famiglia in Egitto

Poussin was the great scholar-painter of his age, and he refused to show the Holy Family's stay in Egypt as a vague desert. Working in Rome around 1656 for a French patron, he studied a famous ancient Roman mosaic from Palestrina that pictured the Egypt of antiquity, and he lifted real details from it: a procession of priests carrying a shrine toward a temple, an odd tower for collecting dew, the sacred ibis kept as holy birds. So the family rests in a busy, believable Egyptian town square, with its own pagan religion going on all around them. Instead of angels tending the child he painted ordinary townspeople, a young man and two girls, bringing bread and water.