The Flight into Egypt

What you are looking at

The image on this page is a detail of the upper right part of the painting: the night sky. A full moon hangs low over a dark line of trees, wrapped in a soft ring of light, and thin clouds drift across it, lit silver from below. Above, the sky deepens to blue-black and fills with stars, some bright, some faint, arranged not at random but in recognizable patterns.

In the full painting, which measures only about 31 by 41 centimeters, the Holy Family travels through this landscape at night. Joseph, holding a burning torch, leads the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ, who ride a donkey. At the left, shepherds sit around a fire at the edge of a wood; on the right, the moon is reflected in a still lake. Three sources of light, moon, torch and fire, compete in the darkness.

Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a German painter working in Rome, painted it on a copper plate in 1609. It is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

The sky

What made the picture famous is the sky. Elsheimer painted the Milky Way as a band of countless tiny stars, perhaps the first time it had been shown that way in Western painting, and he included identifiable constellations such as Ursa Major. He painted it in the same year that Galileo first turned a telescope on the night sky and saw that the Milky Way was made of individual stars. Whether Elsheimer knew of Galileo's observations, or simply looked very hard himself, is debated. The moon, with its visible patches of light and dark, is also unusually observed.

Why copper?

Copper gave a perfectly smooth, hard surface that allowed the tiny details and luminous colors Elsheimer wanted. Small paintings on copper, made to be held and studied close up, were prized by collectors in Rome. Look closely and the stars are single dots of paint, some no larger than a pinhead.

Legacy

Elsheimer died in Rome in December 1610, aged 32, and this was probably one of his last paintings. Peter Paul Rubens, who had known him in Rome, wrote of his grief at the loss. The painting remained in Elsheimer's studio, and prints made after it spread its nocturnal effects across Europe. Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain and many others learned from it.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. For another night scene in our collection, see The Garden of Death, and for Elsheimer, his artist page and our Baroque guide.