Le Massacre des Innocents

Daniele da Volterra is remembered, a little unfairly, as the man who covered up nudity. After Michelangelo died in 1564, the Church hired Daniele to paint draperies over the naked figures in the Last Judgment, and the nickname stuck: il Braghettone, the breeches-maker. But he was a real painter close to Michelangelo, and this crowded Massacre of the Innocents, from 1557, is near his last word in paint. He made it for a church in Volterra, the Tuscan town he came from, and is said to have refused any fee. Soldiers wrench babies from their mothers in a knot of straining bodies that owes everything to Michelangelo's sense of the human figure. After this Daniele worked almost only as a sculptor.