Image Details

Art Resource/Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona

Flight into Egypt. Moses’ salvation was in leaving Egypt; the parallel story of Jesus in the Book of Matthew includes an ironic twist: Jesus escapes Herod’s wrath by going to Egypt.

Weariness from the long journey marks the faces of Joseph and Mary and their beast in this detail from a 13th-century Spanish church altar. Painted in tempera and oil on wood and highlighted with gold leaf, the scene can now be viewed in Barcelona’s Museum of Catalan Art.