The picture belongs to a cycle of lunettes with landscapes and a religious theme. This cycle constitutes a milestone in the reconstruction of the painting of landscapes in seventeenth-century Rome. The teaching of Annibale was to remain an indispensable “school text”, which generations of Italian and foreign painters, from Lorrain to Poussin, from Dughet to Swanevelt, were to tackle, even if only dialectically, up to the end of the century.

Annibale, far from “Flemish dryness”, reveals a natural world imbued with an ancient spirit - the portrayal of the landscape through the filter of humanism and of the Italian Renaissance, in which man and the space which surrounds him live in perfect Arcadian harmony.

Every landscape element is classically balanced and perfectly integrated with the learned citing of ancient buildings, working together to create the so-called “ideal landscape”, that is to say an heroic and courtly conception of nature, seen in profoundly learned terms. Giovan Pietro Bellori, in his biography of Annibale Carracci (1672), mentions a series of six paintings “in the shape of half moons, with towns and figures from sacred stories, by the hand of Annibale, and disciples, which were in the lunettes of the chapel of Palazzo Aldobrandini in the Corso”, paintings which had, however, already been transferred by that date to the Villa Aldobrandini on the Quirinal and then finished by inheritance in the hands of the Doria Pamphilj family by way of the bequest of Olimpia Aldobrandini.

The commission dates back to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement VIII, who between 1603 and 1604 asked Annibale to paint six canvases with the “Stories of the Virgin”, designed for the chapel, no longer in existence, of his palace on the Corso. The works begun by Annibale were then passed to his pupil, Francesco Albani, for reasons so far not fully established; as well as the hypothesis of a difference between Annibale and the cardinal, on account of the services the painter still performed for the Farnese, opponents of the Aldobrandini. There is also the theory, perhaps nearer to the truth, that the artist was already showing signs of that illness - according to the sources, a sort of psychophysical debilitation, today thought to be cerebral arteriosclerosis - which was to lead to his death in 1609, and the abandonment of his work in 1607.

It is certain that in 1606, the year in which Pietro Aldobrandini left Rome following differences with the new pope, Paul V Borghese, before returning in 1610, the cycle had not been completed. Albani would be paid for it in the years between 1605 and 1613, which demonstrates that Annibale had abandoned the field almost immediately.

Critics on the whole recognize the hand of Annibale in the designs for the whole series, but his effective execution in only two, the present one, “The Flight into Egypt”, and that of the “Deposition of Christ”. The other four have been variously attributed to Albani and to followers of Annibale, such as Domenichino, Lanfranco and Sisto Badalocchio.