Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Madonna with Partridges)
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About this painting
The painting is named after what is leaving it. Three partridges break from the tree and fly out above the ring of dancing children, and the Hermitage's own curator reads them as lust — the birds were that sin's attribute — driven off by the Virgin's purity. Everything else agrees with them. The apple tree makes Mary the new Eve; the sunflower and the parrot say undefiled; the white roses say it again. Purity does not argue here. It arrives, and the birds go up.
Sources: Natalia Gritsay, curator of Flemish painting, The State Hermitage Museum, 'Virgin with Partridges', published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation under the Guggenheim-Hermitage collaboration; read 2026-08-27. hermitagemuseum.org itself was unreachable from this environment. · Imperial Hermitage, Catalogue de la Galerie des tableaux, vol. 2, Écoles néerlandaises et école allemande, revised by A. Somov (St Petersburg: C. Daline, 1891), no. 603; digitised by the Getty Research Institute, read 2026-08-27.
Who arose, and took the child and his mother by night, and retired into Egypt: and he was there until the death of Herod:
Matthew 2:14 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 3,554 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.