Die Jungfrau mit Kind, umgeben von den Unschuldigen Kindern

The chubby infants tumbling around the Virgin here are not simply decorative angels. They are the Holy Innocents, the babies King Herod had killed in Bethlehem while hunting for the newborn Christ, and Rubens paints them restored to life as playful children crowding round the very child they died for. It is a consoling turn on a brutal Gospel episode, a slaughter remade as a nursery of the blessed. Rubens painted it around 1618 in Antwerp. Louis XIV bought the picture in 1671, which is how it entered the French royal collection and, in time, the Louvre.