François Perrier French, 1594 -1649

The Flight into Egypt: the Holy Family Prepares to Embark, (Pontarlier, Burgundy, c. 1594 - Paris,1649)

Oil on canvas

100 x 90 cm (39½ x 35½ in)

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Exhibitions

Maison d’Art, Monte-Carlo, 16 June - 16 July 2010, no. 5.

Literature

Maria Angela Novelli, in Tiziana Zennaro, ed., La Pittura Eloquente (exh. cat., Monte-Carlo, Maison d’Art), 2010, pp. 33-35, no. 5.

Alessandro Brogi, “François Perrier e i ‘bolognesi’, Studi di Storia dell’Arte, 29, 2018, pp. 147-166: pp. 151-153 and colour plate XVI.

This vivid, direct depiction of the Flight into Egypt reflects early seventeenth-century interest in lending an intensely humane and naturalistic aspect to episodes drawn from Christian scriptures and legends — in this case a combination of the two, involving the adventures of the Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus and Joseph. The authorship of the French artist François Perrier has only recently been established, but the earlier attribution to Carlo Bononi, a painter who was active in Bologna, is understandable if we consider that Perrier was profoundly influenced by Italian art, and in particular by the Emilian School.

Perrier left France in his twenties, arriving in Rome in 1624 (the same year as Poussin) and assisting Giovanni Lanfranco — a pupil of Annibale Carracci who brought the legacy of his native Parma to Rome — until 1628. The Eternal City was the focus of pan-European artistic interactions, and during the 1620s Perrier must have met Simon Vouet there. In the early 1630s in Paris he collaborated with Vouet and then returned to Rome for a longer stay between 1635 and 1645, during which it appears he painted our canvas. Perrier is well known to cultural historians for his series of etchings illustrating the great Classical statues of Rome, published in 1638 and 1645. He was among the first teachers of Charles Le Brun, and shortly before his death he became one of the founding members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

By the 1600s, the story of the Flight into Egypt, told in the second chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel (but with greater detail and popularity in the apocryphal scriptures of the so-called Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew), had long been a feature of European art. Large-scale mural paintings, altarpieces and countless miniatures recounted how the Holy Family escaped the wrath of King Herod, who ordered the slaughter of newborn boys once he had learned that his power would be eclipsed by a greater ruler (i.e., Jesus Christ). That highly dramatic episode, known as the Massacre of the Innocents, was very familiar to Christians from the Mediaeval period onward, notwithstanding its shocking narrative content.

Here, instead, all is peaceful and even joyful, as the Child reaches out to Joseph with a beautifully natural gesture — the emotional heart of this composition — although those who contemplated the image were well aware of the underlying drama. Still seated astride the donkey which has borne the Holy Couple on their travels, Mary hands the precious bundle to her husband as she prepares to get down herself. With miraculous intervention, the Angel attends to the donkey as the boat stands by. Overall, the mood is one of untroubled anticipation: the family is in the protective hands of God and will no doubt reach their destination safely. The characters may be vulnerable, but there is a sense of reassurance, and indeed the subject of this small easel painting, a sort of altarolo that could have adorned a private domestic chapel, may have been chosen by someone who travelled regularly.

The details of the story offered artists multiple opportunities for narratives with figures, animals, landscapes and occasionally dynamic or dramatic moments. Notable examples of each stage of the journey, as painted by Italian artists of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, include Joseph’s dream, in which he is warned of the imminent danger (Sano di Pietro, in a tiny panel which has recently entered the Louvre); the journey itself (Giotto in Padua, Titian in the Hermitage); pauses on the journey (the so-called “Rest on the Flight”: Correggio in Parma, Caravaggio in Rome); and the return to Judea (Gentile da Fabriano in the Uffizi). Interestingly, the scene with the “barchetta” (little boat) was a relatively rare subject in art. Besides offering a narrative contrast to the darker parts of the tale, it emphasized Christ’s humility, and that quality is echoed in the ordinary clothing worn by Joseph and the simple beast of burden whose task was to carry the Mother and Child. This iconography emerged principally in Northern Europe and then spread south, with some very fine examples appearing in Emilian art after 1600, often with an emphasis on idyllic nature. A focus on a setting involving a boat, as in our picture, occurs several times during the early Seicento, for example in Annibale Caracci’s canvas of c. 1605 in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome, while a privately-owned picture attributed to Ludovico Carracci shows the boat in motion.

Like the vagaries of the Holy Family in the sacred story discussed here, scholarship moves back and forth, ideally building on cumulative revelations of simple but informed observation, documentation and sometimes personal but informed and plausible opinion. In an article of 2018, the Emilian art expert Alessandro Brogi offered a comprehensive review of scholarship on Perrier and analyzed the style of this painting, comparing it with other works by Perrier in the 1640s. His connoisseurship — affirming that this canvas was painted not by Bononi but Perrier — is entirely convincing. The style of the French painter encompasses the naturalism introduced by the Carracci in the 1590s and the Classicism of French painting of the early 1600s. Here, the swift brushstrokes describing the figures and the freely-applied details of landscape are characteristic of Perrier’s admiration for the spontaneity of Emilian painting, as seen in the tousled hair and wind-swept drapery of the Angel, but also a sensitivity to Classical art, as evinced by the figure of Joseph. The private individual or family who must have owned this in the seventeenth century were fortunate indeed.

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