Le Massacre des Innocents

Rubens painted this in his last years, around 1636 to 1638, after buying a country house south of Antwerp and stepping back from the diplomatic missions that had filled much of his life. His hands were stiff with gout by then, yet he returned to one of the harshest subjects in the Gospels: Herod's soldiers killing the young boys of Bethlehem. It was the second time he took on the massacre, the first painted decades earlier as a young man just back from Italy. Those Italian years still show. The straining, twisting bodies carry a clear debt to ancient sculpture and to the muscular drama he had studied in Rome. He gave the horror no softening, packing the oak panel edge to edge with struggling figures.