The Return of the Holy Family to Nazareth

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

When King Herod learned that he would lose his throne to a child born in Bethlehem, he ordered all male infants to be massacred. Mary and Joseph thus fled to Egypt to protect their son, Jesus. The age of the boy in this painting suggests that Poussin depicted the less-common subject of the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Jesus reaches toward a vision of a cross borne by angels, a reference to both his eventual crucifixion and Herod’s cruel slaughter of innocent children. Nicolas Poussin used wax figures and wetted paper or fabric to model the bodies in his paintings, helping him to capture the realistic folds, movement, and balance of light and shadow.