Le Massacre des Innocents

Poussin painted this in Rome, around 1628, for the collector Vincenzo Giustiniani. The subject is Herod's order to kill every boy in Bethlehem under two, and instead of a crowded battlefield Poussin strips it down to a handful of figures. A soldier pins a child under his foot with a raised sword; the mother beneath him twists back and screams, her mouth wide open. Poussin built the whole composition around two diagonals that drive the eye straight to that scream, and he held his colours to a stark few. Artists studied this single howling face for centuries afterward as the model for extreme grief.