The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Pier Francesco Mola
ca. 1641
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is an oil painting on copper by the Italian Baroque master Pier Francesco Mola (1612–1666), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt was a popular subject in art, as was the Flight into Egypt itself.
The scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend, Joseph and Mary stopped on the flight in a grove of trees; the Holy Child ordered the trees to bend down so that Joseph could take fruit from them, and then ordered a spring of water to gush forth from the roots so that his parents could quench their thirst.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 · Text: Wikipedia (adapted), CC BY-SA 4.0