This sheet illustrates the Holy Family fleeing from King Herod into Egypt, a biblical story from the Gospel of Matthew. Like most of Campagnola’s drawings, the story provides little more than a cover for his primary interest: landscape. While the palm tree left of center signals the story’s North African location, the dense woods and distant mountains
recall the artist’s native Italian countryside.

Campagnola played an important role in establishing landscape as a subject in European art and in the rise of drawings as collectible objects in and of themselves.