Albrecht Dürer
Sojourn of the Holy Family in Egypt
1501-1502
Woodcut
Bostom Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, Accession No. 20.1167
Dürer works from the assumption that the family's sojourn lasted long enough for Joseph and Mary to settle down into household activities – carpentry for him, spinning thread for her. This would accord with the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior (25), which says they stayed in Egypt for three years. Pseudo-Matthew (25) says they stayed only briefly, and Matthew 2:15 says only that the sojourn ended with the death of Herod, without saying when it began.
Perhaps the whole composition is simply a tissue of inventions by the artist. I know of no other image that contemplates a sojourn long enough for a settling into domestic life, nor do the extensive accounts of miracles in the Arabic source deal with little angels helping Joseph with his work or big ones standing by while Mary spins her thread.
The woodcut is described in Cartlidge and Elliott, 104-105. They identify the crowned figure on the far right as Affrodisius, the high priest in the Egyptian city of Sotina, which would imply that Sotina is the locale of this image. But the figure has wings, so it has to be an angel – or possibly a devil disguising himself, given the rather masculine face.
The woodcut's title given above is the one used by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Some sources on the internet call it The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, but that would be entirely inconsistent with what is happening in the scene.
Read more about images of the Flight into Egypt.
Source: this page at Wikimedia Commons.
