The Flight into Egypt

This engraving represents the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt in order to escape the massacre of the Jewish male infants by Herod. Schongauer evokes a Middle Eastern landscape in his detailed depiction of exotic flora and fauna. Angels pluck the fruit of a date palm; parrots are seen among the branches of a rare dragon tree, while lizards scale its trunk. The remarkably accurate portrayal of a very rare Canarian dragon tree on the left side of this composition has led some scholars to conclude that the artist must have visited the Iberian Peninsula to make an accurate depiction of the plant.

Little is known of Martin Schongauer’s artistic training other than the fact that he enrolled at Leipzig University in 1465. There is evidence that he may have trained with a Netherlandish or Burgundian master, and it is likely he traveled to the Netherlands during his early years as an artist. Schongauer was a great influence on the younger Albrecht Dürer. Dürer had traveled to visit him in 1492, only to discover that he had died the previous year. This engraving may have inspired Dürer’s woodcut of the same subject in his Life of the Virgin series (c. 1503 – 1505), in which he also depicts a date palm, dragon tree, deer, and lizards.