The Flight into Egypt

The New Testament narrative of the Holy Family fleeing Jerusalem into Egypt to escape King Herod’s massacre of first-born sons is one that frequently lends itself to depictions of unfamiliar landscapes. In Schongauer’s representation, the Holy Family wanders through a land decidedly different from what the artist would have encountered in his native Germany. His penchant for incorporating a scintillating amount of detail has allowed scholars to identify the tree at left as a specific type—a rare Canarian dragon tree—native to the Iberian peninsula. Whether the artist traveled to the region remains an open question, but his inclusion of the extraordinary specimen in this rendering points to his attempt to provide authentic details for a distant landscape he had never seen.