The Flight into Egypt

The Flight into Egypt — Domenico Campagnola. c. 1540.

Medium: Pen and brown ink on dark cream laid paper, laid down on laid paper, with pen and ink and gold ruled lines. Dimensions: Primary support: 18.7 × 25 cm (7 3/8 × 9 7/8 in.); Secondary support: 24.1 × 30.2 cm (9 1/2 × 11 15/16 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

This sheet illustrates the Holy Family fleeing from King Herod into Egypt, a biblical story from the Gospel of Matthew. Like most of Campagnola’s drawings, the story provides little more than a cover for his primary interest: landscape. While the palm tree left of center signals the story’s North African location, the dense woods and distant mountains recall the artist’s native Italian countryside. Campagnola played an important role in establishing landscape as a subject in European art and in the rise of drawings as collectible objects in and of themselves.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.