Return to Nazareth (1735): Art, History and Details

Return to Nazareth (1735) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francesco Conti (Italian, 1681–1760).

The work and its context

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

Upon hearing rumor of a young king born to a virgin in Bethlehem, Herod, the ruler of Judea, jealously developed a plot to find and murder the infant Jesus. Fearing Herod's wrath, the Holy Family escaped to Egypt and eventually returned to Palestine-an echo of the great Exodus of the Old Testament. Conti trained in Rome but eventually made his career in Florence. Even given the pale colors, balletic poses, and attenuated forms, the sharp contrasts of dark and light, with figures emerging from deep shadow, attests to the long shadow of Caravaggio even in Florence a century later.

Object facts

• Title: Return to Nazareth
• Date: 1735
• Creator attribution: Francesco Conti (Italian, 1681–1760)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 136.5 x 102.5 x 6 cm (53 3/4 x 40 3/8 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 118.2 x 84.2 cm (46 9/16 x 33 1/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1974.2

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1974.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 62, no. 3 (March 1975): 62–102. Published as attributed to Josef Ignaz Mildorfer
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

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.