Winter landscape with the Massacre of the Innocents

Painted on a fine Flemish panel which bears two well-preserved armorial seals (fig. 1), this picture is particularly remarkable for its unusual iconography. What first meets the eye is the hustle and bustle of a group of men-at-arms -- one sheathing his sword while a youth looks back pointedly at the viewer, clutching a stiletto in his right hand; another trying to control a hound which strains at the sight of a host of cavalry riding precipitously downhill, away from the viewer and towards a snowbound village in the background, while one of their company relieves himself against a tree, his lance held by a well-dressed page. At second glance, the viewer sees that the subject of the work is actually the Massacre of the Innocents, with the explicit action unfolding in the background at left. This remarkable restaging of the Biblical narrative (Matthew 2:16-18) must be indebted to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's great Massacre of the Innocents (The Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace, London), which was painted circa 1566 and enjoyed great popularity, with numerous repetitions painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (e.g. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and his studio. Such was the success of the subject that Pieter the Younger is credited with the invention of a different, 'small' Massacre composition in a similar vein (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique and elsewhere). The present work retains the winter setting of Pieter the Elder's invention, one of its most distinctive features, while inverting the vantage point, transporting the viewer to the vanguard of the forest of spears which looms threateningly in the centre background of the Bruegel. In the present work, one is challenged by the assertion that one is with the troops -- or, at any rate, witness to slightly earlier moment in the narrative, that of the descent on the peaceful hamlet. It has often been noted that Bruegel's idea, taken up here, has a political subtext as an indictment of the excesses of Habsburg soldiers in the sixteenth-century Low Countries.

The style of the landscape strongly recalls that Flemish artists working in the second half of the sixteenth century, such as Jacob Grimmer (1525/6-1590) and especially Gillis Mostaert (c. 1528/9-1598). The straining hound, painted with spirited impasto (as is its grim-faced keeper), finds an echo in the foreground of Mostaert's Landscape with soldiers of 1574 (Germany, private collection.) Another version of the present composition (panel, 26½ x 46½ in.) was sold at Christie's, London, 29 June 1928, lot 109 (32 gns. to Collings), as Brueghel.

We are grateful to Philippe Palasi and to Jan van Helmont for their help in cataloguing the armorial seals.R