The Flight into Egypt

Bernardino Jacobi Butinone · c. 1485

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

25.6 × 22 cm (10 1/8 × 8 11/16 in.); Framed: 30.8 × 26.7 × 5.1 cm (12 1/8 × 10 1/2 × 2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Bernardino Butinone's *The Flight into Egypt* is a jewel of late fifteenth-century Lombard painting — intimate in scale, yet charged with a quiet intensity that holds the eye long after first glance. Butinone worked in Milan and its surrounding towns during a period when northern Italian painting was absorbing influences from Padua and beyond, and his style reflects that tension between rigid, sculptural figures and a genuine tenderness in narrative moments. His tempera technique on panel produces crisp, almost enamel-like surfaces, with drapery that folds in sharp, deliberate rhythms — a hallmark of the Lombard school in this era. He is thought to have collaborated closely with Bernardo Zenale on several major altarpiece commissions, and that partnership likely sharpened his eye for compositional clarity. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this small panel as part of a collection that traces the full arc of Italian Renaissance painting, and it remains one of the few works by Butinone accessible outside of Italy. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's luminous colour and precise draughtsmanship onto canvas with careful attention to the delicate modelling of faces and the warm ochre tones of the landscape — giving this overlooked masterpiece a second life in your home.