Master of the Female Half-Lengths, 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt', about 1540

The holy family rest as they flee from Bethlehem to Egypt, trying to escape King Herod’s order that all boys under two be killed. The Virgin Mary sits on a low wall that encloses a courtyard and a fountain. She has opened her dress and chemise to reveal her right breast, evidently to feed her son. Saint Joseph stands behind the wall and bends over to offer a dish of fruit – grapes, apples, cherries and perhaps a pear – to Christ. Their donkey, saddled and ready to go, grazes quietly in the field behind them.

In the background are blue mountains, and on the left is a large town with many high buildings, including a circular edifice that is perhaps a temple. A highway leads from the town, across an arched bridge and towards an immense castle built on the crags behind Joseph’s head. On the left, in the fields below the town, a ploughman is at work, and the miracle of the corn – a very popular story in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – is taking place. Herod’s soldiers, pursuing the holy family, meet a peasant who tells them, truthfully, that a mother and child had passed that way when he was sowing his wheat. The wheat had grown and ripened miraculously overnight.

Growing behind the wall is a fig tree. This was the first tree mentioned in the Bible, its leaves used by Adam and Eve to conceal their nakedness (Genesis 3: 7). It might also stand for the palm tree which, during the flight into Egypt, bent down at Christ’s command to give his mother its fruit. Christ reaches out to touch an apple, which identifies him as the second Adam, as he was sacrificed on the Cross to redeem humankind from the Fall. The grapes refer to the Eucharist, while cherries are sometimes described as ‘the fruits of Paradise’.

The fountain is in the form of a gilded statue of a small winged boy who carries an arrow and is urinating into the basin. He is perhaps Cupid, and maybe an allusion to the legend of how the pagan idols of Egypt fell as Christ passed by (as in The Flight into Egypt by Goossen van der Weyden).

The panel once had an arched top, like The Crucifixion by Quinten Massys. There are obvious similarities between this painting and The Concert, the key work by the Master of the Female Half-Lengths (Schloss Rohrau, near Vienna). The Virgin’s head is very similar to those of the women in that painting, both in facial type and in the treatment of light and shadow. The thumbs and fingers are similarly distorted and the ways in which the figures are arranged, with a strong diagonal emphasis, are much the same. The two were probably painted around the same time, which, from the ladies' clothes in The Concert, may have been around 1540. A Female Head is also closely related to this painting in all respects.