Here is an interesting image to contemplate. It is a work from 1570 by Italian painter Federico Barocci of Mary, Joseph and Jesus resting on their flight into Egypt to escape Herod's Massacre of the Innocents.

It's one of many images of this biblical vignette that has no direct biblical source. The scaffolding of the narrative—the flight from Herod into Egypt—is told in Matthew, but the details that so often caught the imagination of artists: the resting, the miraculous appearance of food and water is only found in extra-biblical sources notably the Qur'an:

Grieve not! For they Lord hath provided a rivulet beneath thee; And shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm-tree: It will let fall fresh ripe dates upon thee.

What is most interesting from the point of view of a photographer, however, is the way Barocci has lit his subjects. It looks surprisingly like electronic flash. For a photographer this is a common backlight situation; although somewhat obscured by clouds, the sun is setting behind our trio and cannot provide illumination on their faces. To solve this problem a photographer would introduce an artificial light source. In photographic parlance we would say that Barocci has underexposed the ambient by a few stops, added some fill, and placed a slightly soft key light above camera left. I am struck by the similarity of paintings like this to the techniques described by photographic small light gurus such strobist David Hobby and Joe McNally For example, although the composition and subject matter are not remotely similar, the idea behind the lighting of this image is analogous to Barocci's. They have both solved the same problem in more or less the same way. The great age of artificial light pioneered by theatrical lighting innovator Niccolò Sabbatini and painters such as El Greco and Caravaggio would reach an apex in the generations after Barocci as the masters of mannerism and baroque art exaggerated artificiality and emotion over the naturalism of the renaissance. It continues today. Anyone who uses a flash unit to overpower the ambient illumination pays a small homage to these early explorers of light.