The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Maerten van Heemskerck

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a pale-skinned woman sits in front of a vast landscape and holds a nude baby boy on her lap in this horizontal painting. The woman, Mary, sits with her knees angled to our left, but she looks at us from the corners of brown eyes. She has a delicate nose, smooth cheeks, a pointed chin, and her pink lips are closed. A few strands of blond hair escape from braids that overlap across the top of her head. She wears a rose-red dress over a translucent white undergarment, which is visible along the neckline and on the forearms. A cloth striped with azure and powder blue, pale pink, lemon yellow, and teal drapes across her seated thighs and wraps back around her hips. One hand rests in her lap near one of the baby’s feet, and the other braces the child’s other hip. The baby, Jesus, has tightly curled blond hair and a flushed face. His body resembles a somewhat muscular adult. Jesus rests his shoulders back against the woman’s chest and turns to look up at her. One hand touches one of her breasts and the other holds a butterfly by its parchment-yellow wings. The foot not by the woman’s hand rests on a gold dagger near the woman’s far hip. A gnarled tree with dark green leaves winds from a rocky crag to our left. The pair are lit from our left, and Mary casts a shadow on the large, flat boulder on which she sits. The land dips steeply down beyond the boulder. A man wearing a pale pink garment that flaps in the wind stands on a rocky outcropping near a grazing animal. Tiny in scale, three more people walk or run in the distance to our right. Stone structures are tucked in among tree-dotted hills that roll gently back to a hazy blue, mountainous horizon, which comes about five-sixths of the way up this composition. The sky above is a similar icy blue.