Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1624): Art, History and Details

Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1624) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Guercino (Italian, 1591–1666).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (called il Guercino) created Rest on the Flight to Egypt as a tondo, a circular canvas rarely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries except in the case of holy subjects. The round shape represents the circle, symbolic for the nature of God, believed to have no end and no beginning. The painting depicts Mary the Mother of God, the Infant Christ, St. Joseph, and a musical angel, serenading the Holy Family during their exhausting journey through Egypt. Guercino, "the squint-eyed", was born near Bologna and became an influential painter in Rome in the early seventeenth century, where he created important commissions. His style was an important mix of the strong use of tenebrism, introduced by Caravaggio, and artists of the classical baroque, such as Domenichino, Annibale Carracci, and Guido Reni. The composition is clearly composed with strongly modeled forms and a cool harmony of colors. The sleeping Infant Christ is lulled to sleep by the angel's violin and the ideal landscape with classical ruins adds to the calm serenity of this painting.

Object facts

• Title: Rest on the Flight into Egypt
• Date: 1624
• Creator attribution: Guercino (Italian, 1591–1666)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 95.9 x 96.6 x 10.8 cm (37 3/4 x 38 1/16 x 4 1/4 in.); Diameter: 68.5 cm (26 15/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1967.123

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Blythe, Joan. “Reading Milton Greenly.” In Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England, edited by Ken Hiltner, p. 183, fig. 41. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008.
• De Grazia, Diane. "Guercino decoratore." in Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino, 1591–1966. Bologna: Nuova Alfa editoriale, 1991.
• Brigstocke, Hugh. William Buchanan and the 19th Century Art Trade: 100 Letters to His Agents in London and Italy. Art Documents. London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1982. pp. 491, 340, 401, 403, 416–417.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.