The Rest on the Return from Egypt is the work of the Dutch engraver and draughtsman Cornelis Cort after the drawing by Federico Baroccio. It is made with a graver tool on a copper plate and printed on the expensive laid paper made of linen fibers and cellulose pulp. This engraving has four states, or versions, with varying corrections. The Irbit State Museum of Fine Arts has the print of the fourth and last state.
Cornelis Cort did this work in 1575. By that time, he had already become an important influence in the European burin engraving. Cort and his pupils and followers chose large surface plates and used a free stroke, left a lot of air and created a painting effect with the help of chiaroscuro and fine lines.

The engraving is based on a religious story. The Gospel according to St. Matthew recounts that Herod was looking for the baby Jesus to kill him. Joseph who received a warning in his dream, sent his adopted son and Mary to Egypt to wait out the threat there. The Virgin Mary and Jesus stayed in the foreign country and did not return to Nazareth until Herod had died. On the way back Mary stopped to have a rest under a palm tree. They saw fruit at the top of the tree, too far and out of their reach. The little Jesus then asked the tree to stoop, so that his mother could sate her hunger, and to open up the spring in the tree roots so that she could collect some water. The palm tree obeyed the child. Before they left Jesus told the palm tree that a branch of it will be planted in heaven and will become a blessing for all winners in battles of faith.
The peaceful scene of the rest of the Holy Family on their return from Egypt and the story of the palm tree branch were popular in the Counterreformation art (1545–1563), when the Vatican was pursuing internal reforms in an attempt to restore the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church all over Europe. When Catholics and Protestants confronted each other, their struggle culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which began in 1618 and remained the deadliest conflict until 1914. The result was the final schism between the Christian denominations.

Cort had a brilliant career. As a young man he started working for the publisher Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp and spent 13 years there. Cort did copperplates engraving after Rogier van der Weyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Frans Floris, Breughel the Elder and other Dutch painters. In the same years he did a series of etchings after his own drawings with scenes around Antwerp. In 1565 Cort left the publisher and moved to Italy where he worked with the Renaissance masters and Rafael, Michelangelo, Romano, Caravaggio and others. In Venice he met Titian. Cort at that time did several copperplates after Titian’s original paintings — St. Jerome in the desert, Magdalen, Prometheus. Titian circulated prints to his publishers and acquired the rights to publish Cornelis’s engravings. Later Cort travelled to the Netherlands, Rome, Bologna, and did engravings for the Medici family in Florence. In his later years he returned to his work with Titian and in 1573 opened up a large engraving studio in Rome. Cornelis Cort’s legacy consists of more than 300 engravings and etchings.