The Massacre of the Innocents

Pieter Bruegel the Elder moved King Herod's massacre of the children of Bethlehem into a snowy Flemish village of his own day, and this is a copy of that picture. Mounted soldiers in red tunics, a kind of police troop the first viewers would have recognised, break into houses while mothers plead and fathers try to bargain. The original, now in the British Royal Collection, was later overpainted so that the murdered children became animals and bundles. This copy shows the killings as Bruegel painted them. Tests on the wood and a few small slips suggest it was made in the last quarter of the 16th century, and the museum attributes it, with a question mark, to his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Both versions once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II. Part of a signature, BRVEG, survives at the lower right.