Flight into Egypt

The earliest of Domenico’s drawings naturally reveal a profound debt to the work of Giulio Campagnola, but they also reflect the direct influence of prints by Albrecht Dürer, who had visited Venice twice during Giulio’s lifetime, and whose style was widely disseminated in northern Italy. Dürer’s influence is especially apparent in the Library’s earliest drawing by Domenico Campagnola, a Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Elisabetta Saccomani proposes that the present sheet is one of a group of finished, compositional drawings made by Campagnola about 1517 as studies for engravings (1982, 88). Included in this proposed group are: a Flight into Egypt in Stockholm (inv. 281/1963); Abraham and Isaac in the Witt Collection (Courtauld Institute, London; inv. 4085); the Calling of Peter and Andrew in Haarlem (inv. K IX 13; Keyes 1976, 167-172, no.2); a wood engraving of the Adoration of the Magi, signed but undated (Muraro and Rosand 1976, no. 22); an engraving of the Sacra Conversazione (Muraro and Rosand 1976, no.7); and a drawing of Saint Jerome in a Landscape, formerly in the Woodner collection. William Griswold notes that the Morgan Library drawing may have been made in preparation for an unexecuted woodcut rather than engraving.

The composition is inspired by that of a woodcut of the same subject, executed about 1503 by Dürer (TIB, 10: no. 89) as part of a series of prints illustrating seventeen scenes from the life of the Virgin. A painting of the Flight into Egypt in the Scuola del Carmine, Padua, attributed to Domenico, shows a slightly similar composition in reverse to the Morgan Library drawing.