Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Around the Thirties of the sixteenth century, the Dutchman Lambert Sustris came to Venice with other fellow-countrymen – emigrants from Flanders, and particularly from Antwerp, due to religious wars or for reasons of work – bringing new elements into the local artistic tradition: the background landscapes become more animated and are illuminated by a cold, artificial light, which intensifies the plastic impact and creates particular colour contrasts, while the figures become more distanced from Titian's naturalism.

This small work in the Civic Art Gallery, painted by Sustris about the middle of the sixth decade of the sixteenth century, is an interesting document of this fertile relationship between Italian and Flemish painting.

The landscape behind the Madonna and Child is populated by numerous figures, made inconsistent by the intense bright light which, penetrating through the clouds, “flows over the things, the objects, the vegetation” (Baldissin Molli). On the right, the group portraying Saint Joseph taking the donkey to drink at a little stream, the sparkling waters of which are painted with rapid touches of white, is a vivid example of the particular skill in rendering landscape acquired by Sustris, thanks also to the influence of the art of Tintoretto and of Andrea Schiavone. The complex pose of the Madonna, in the foreground, indicates the artist's link with the Central Italian Manner, which became known in the Veneto also thanks to his activity.