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This picture reveals Claude Lorrain’s real interest. It was not the biblical theme of Mary and Joseph’s flight with the infant Christ to escape the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem, but rather the depiction of a landscape. The characters referred to in the title have been reduced to tiny figures at the left edge of the scene. Greater prominence is given, by contrast, to the shepherds in the foreground, not in this case as part of the biblical story but simply as a popular motif in idyllic landscapes.