A Fuga para o Egito

Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini ordered this around 1603 for the chapel of his palace in Rome, the building we now call the Doria Pamphilj, where it still hangs. He wanted six half-moon panels, and Carracci ran the job with his pupils, among them the young Domenichino. This one is almost entirely his own hand. Notice how small the holy family is. Mary and the child on the donkey, Joseph walking them across a river toward Egypt, are tucked into the lower corner, while the real subject fills the rest: a calm, ordered countryside of towers, a walled town on a hill, a shepherd with his flock, water catching the light. Carracci had been studying the poems of Virgil, and he built the land into a noble, harmonious thing rather than a backdrop. That idea, that a landscape could carry the weight of a sacred story, was taken up a generation later by Poussin and by Claude Lorrain, who turned it into a whole tradition.