Massacre of the Innocents

By 1525 this small panel already belonged to Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, of the family that ruled Ferrara, and it later passed through a second Este cardinal before reaching the Medici. The subject is grim: King Herod's order to kill every infant boy in Bethlehem, hoping to catch the newborn Christ among them. Mazzolino packs the horror onto a panel about 60 centimetres wide, the soldiers and mothers twisted around one another so tightly the eye can hardly separate them. That knot of straining bodies comes straight from Roman sarcophagi and from Raphael's Vatican frescoes, both known in the north through prints that circulated among the courts. Behind the violence the same cultivated taste sits at rest, in delicately carved friezes and antique-looking armour, the work of a man who plainly loved ancient art. The attribution has never fully settled. It usually goes to Mazzolino, though some scholars, struck by how it differs from his other biblical scenes, have linked it instead to the workshop of Battista Dossi, another Ferrarese painter. Herod's soldiers wear the polished parade armour of Mazzolino's own century rather than anything from the ancient world the story belongs to.