Image Details

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

The Italian painter Giotto, in this 13th-century fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, depicts Joseph and one son leading Mary to safety in Egypt after Jesus’ birth. The Gospel of Matthew recounts that “[Joseph] took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt” (Matthew 2:13). But in the apocryphal Pseudo-Gospel of Matthew, Joseph is accompanied by “a boy”—perhaps one of his sons (compare with image of Kahrie Cami mosaic).