The painting depicts The Rest on the Flight into Egypt: the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child is placed at the centre of the composition against a landscape background; beside them is Joseph, bending towards them with a cherry branch, while on the right an ass is visible – the traditional attribute of the journey to Egypt. The scene is treated not as a dramatic episode, but as a gentle, almost idyllic pause: the figures are unified by the flowing rhythm of their gestures, the warm red and pink tones of their garments, subtle chiaroscuro modelling, and a lyrical landscape. According to Professor Claudio Strinati, this is an iconographic type particularly favoured by Federico Barocci, known through several autograph versions and related repetitions.

Federico Barocci was one of the foremost Italian masters of the second half of the sixteenth century, an artist of the Urbino school who combined Late Renaissance harmony with soft emotionality, refined handling of light, and a painterly freedom that anticipated the Baroque. Strinati places this work within Barocci’s circle of autograph works: he emphasises its closeness to the version in the Vatican Pinacoteca, the rigour of the drawing, the softness of the painterly surface, and the expressiveness of the faces, while allowing for possible workshop participation, which was characteristic of repetitions of Barocci’s successful compositions. The value of the painting lies in its high artistic quality, very good state of preservation, historical significance as a version of a celebrated composition, and its belonging to the same period as the principal variants.

Size: 133 x 108 cm.