Strage degli Innocenti

Rubens came home to Antwerp in 1608 after eight years in Italy, and this is one of the pictures from those first years back, around 1611. He is working from what he had seen in Rome, the raking light of Caravaggio and the twisting bodies of ancient sculpture, on a subject out of Matthew's gospel, Herod's soldiers sent to kill the children of Bethlehem. For most of its life nobody knew it was his. A catalogue of 1767 gave it to a minor Antwerp painter, an inventory of 1780 to one of Rubens's assistants working after him, and it hung for decades in an Austrian family's house as something much lesser. A Sotheby's specialist recognised it in 2001. It sold the next year for 49.5 million pounds to Kenneth Thomson, who gave it to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where it has hung since 2008.