The Massacre of the Innocents

Bruegel painted the Bible's massacre of the children, but he set it in a Flemish village in deep snow, in the years when Spanish troops were beginning to crush revolt in the Netherlands. The soldiers riding in wear the black armour of that occupation. Now look at what the villagers are actually losing. In many spots you would expect a dead or dying child, you instead see a slaughtered goose, a bundle, a jar, an animal. That is not how Bruegel left it. Later the Emperor Rudolf the Second owned the picture and found the killing of babies too much to look at, so he had the children painted over and turned into food and livestock. A scene of massacre was quietly converted into a scene of plunder. Conservation in 1998 confirmed what lies under those changes, and with age the overpaint has grown faint enough to read both stories at once.