The Massacre of the Innocents

The horror in this picture reached Venice partly through prints. Bonifazio painted it around 1537 for the chamber of the Council of Ten, the Republic's most feared magistracy, in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi. For the massacre ordered by King Herod and the soldiers hunting down the children, he leaned on figures invented by Raphael in Rome, which had travelled north as engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. A Venetian painter could study Roman design without leaving the lagoon. Onto that borrowed drawing he laid a local skin. The vivid red of the foreground figure is the kind of colour Titian was drawing from Venetian portraiture, and the landscape behind carries the soft light of Giorgione's generation. The floor drops away steeply, so the violence seems to tumble toward you.