Landscape with the Flight into Egypt

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Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (Pieter Bruegel the Elder)
Landscape with the Flight into Egypt
Pieter Bruegel the Elder , 1563
oil on wood
37.1 x 55.6 cm
The Courtauld Gallery
Idol falling from the tabernacle
Three hikers

Landscape with the Flight into Egypt is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1563 . The oil painting on wood is one of the artist's overview landscapes and is located in the Courtauld Gallery in London. The dimensions are 37.1 × 55.6 cm.

Content and structure

A rugged mountain landscape opens up to a river valley with fields, corridors, a castle and a town. Behind it is a sea or lake. The transition from near to far is staggered into several spatial layers on the left edge of the picture. The foreground is dark brown, the middle ground is green and the distance is bluish, so the artist enhances the impression of depth. On the stage-like foreground, hikers cross the picture from right to left: the man turns his back on the viewer and the woman in the red cloak with child uses a donkey as a mount. The terrain slopes steeply behind them. In the further course of the path three other people can be seen at the bottom left. Two of them are crossing a precipice on a makeshift board or tree trunk.

interpretation

It is a Bruegelian overview landscape in succession to the world landscapes of Joachim Patinier . The people in the foreground are St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus . It is a depiction of the flight into Egypt , this is made clear by a rather inconspicuous detail near the lower right corner, because there an idol falls from a tabernacle. The apocryphal pseudo-Matthew Gospel reports that 365 statues of gods in a temple would have fallen through the presence of the child Jesus alone. Similar to the Legenda Aurea , which says that there were broken idols in every Egyptian temple. However, Bruegel does not paint a temple or a biblical landscape, but relocates the events completely to his time and an alpine environment. The way through the high mountains, like the one through the desert, can only be mastered with hardship and danger. He proceeded in a similar way later in the oil painting The Conversion of Paul (1567).

History and signature

In the 16th century, the painting was owned by Antoine Perrenot de Granvelles , a minister of Margarete von Parmas , governor- general of the Habsburg Netherlands. Since 1978 it has belonged to the collection of the Courtauld Gallery in London. It is signed "BRVEGEL MDLXIII" lower right.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Christian Vöhringer: Pieter Bruegel. 1525/30 - 1569 , hfullmann 2007 ISBN 978-3-8331-3852-2 Chapter: Early Paintings p. 30 ff
  2. ^ Pseudo-Matthew Gospel , translated by Hans Zimmermann, accessed on February 2, 2012
  3. ^ Jacobus de Voragine - The Legenda Aurea, translated by Richard Benz. Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2007 15th edition ISBN 978-3-579-02560-5 Chapter: From the innocent little children (p. 58)
  4. ^ Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen: Pieter Bruegel the Elder Ä. around 1525-1569. Peasants, fools and demons . Taschen Verlag 1999 ISBN 3-8228-6590-7 p. 95, appendix, section "Notes" (No. 7)
  5. ^ The Courtauld Institute of Art accessed February 2, 2012

Web links

Commons : Landscape with the Flight into Egypt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files