Flight into Egypt

Entry

St Matthew (2:13-14) describes how the Holy Family fled Bethlehem and went into Egypt to escape King Herod, who was determined to kill the newborn Christ child. In accordance with the traditional iconography, Mary is depicted here with her son as an infant, riding on the back of a donkey. The animal appears to be sighing under its divine burden. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that Joseph was omitted in order to focus the attention of the faithful on the Virgin and Child on the donkey, the group probably originally included a figure of Joseph, carved separately, who either held the donkey’s reins (cf. BK-1955-18) or was picking fruit from a palm tree in the background, an allusioin to the apocryphal micracle of the palm tree (cf. fig. a).

The statue was found in 1903 in the attic of the town hall in Wijk bij Duurstede, which had been built in 1660-62 to replace the early sixteenth-century town hall. Regrettably there is no information about the background to this find. In 1951 the municipal historian, Hendrik Hijmans, asserted that the statue came from the estate of the bishop of Utrecht, Philip of Burgundy (1465-1524), who resided at Duurstede Castle.² Further enquiry revealed that this was just an unfounded assumption.³ Instead, it would seem more likely that this really rather naïve and somewhat clumsy group did duty in the Grote Kerk in Wijk bij Duurstede. If this is the case, the statue must have been removed at the time of the Iconoclasm and, as often happened, taken to the town hall for safekeeping.⁴ It would then have been moved in the seventeenth century to the new town hall, where it languished in the attic over the centuries.

The piece was initially thought to originate from the Lower Rhine region,⁵ but the sober realism of the group, the Virgin’s stocky build, her sweet, doll-like face with its high, protuberant forehead, and her thick cloak with irregular folds, pushed back on her head, are more akin to the Northern Netherlandish sculpture of around 1500. The fact that it was found in Wijk bij Duurstede suggests that it was most likely made in Utrecht, the nearby centre of woodcarving. Although there are no directly related pieces, Defoer places the Amsterdam Flight into Egypt in a group of probably Utrecht carvings of a rather conservative style, made up of a small devotional relief of the Nativity, an altarpiece group of the Adoration and two versions of a St Anne Trinity.⁶ A smaller Flight into Egypt (fig. b) that can be dated slightly later, which is now in the treasury of the Sankt-Martinikirche in Emmerich, Germany, and comes from the Catholic orphanage there, is regarded as a Utrecht import piece.⁷ The carving of this little group is finer, however, and the detailing of the figures – particularly the donkey – is more realistic than in the Rijksmuseum’s work.

The large size of the sculpture is reminiscent of the Palm Sunday donkeys that were carried or pulled along in processions. It is evident that this group was not made for such a purpose, since the reverse is flat and hollowed out, as in a contemporaneous Flight into Egypt of similar dimensions from Normandy.⁸ These ensembles would originally have been displayed in a caisse or against a wall, probably as the main scene in an altar.⁹ Another late fifteenth-century Netherlandish group of the Flight into Egypt, sold at auction in London, is finished completely in the round and may well have been used in processions.¹⁰ Interestingly, as in the group from Normandy and the Amsterdam and Emmerich examples, the figure of Joseph is also missing here or never existed.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024
An earlier version of this entry was published in M. Leeflang et al. (eds.), Middeleeuwse beelden uit Utrecht 1430-1530, exh. cat. Utrecht (Museum Catharijneconvent)/Aachen (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum) 2012-13, no. 46