Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'Massacre of the Innocents,' painted around 1566-67 and known in two principal versions (the finest now in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle), is one of the most politically charged paintings of the 16th century and one of the most powerful anti-war statements in the history of art - a work that used a biblical narrative to indict a contemporary political atrocity.
The biblical source is Matthew 2:16-18. When the Magi failed to return to Herod with information about the newborn king, 'Herod, when he saw that he had been outwitted by the Magi, was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.' Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31:15 as the prophetic fulfillment: 'A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be consoled, because they are no more.'
Bruegel's painting transposes this biblical atrocity into a contemporary Flemish village in the grip of winter. The village is recognizable as Netherlandish: timber-framed houses, a frozen stream, snow on the rooftops. But occupying the village are soldiers in clearly contemporary 16th-century armor - the dark red cloaks and equipment of the Spanish Habsburg forces that were then conducting a campaign of brutal suppression against the Protestant Netherlands. A black-armored commander on horseback directs the operation from the center of the composition.
The soldiers move methodically from house to house. Parents resist, cling to their children, wail over small bodies in the snow. The grief is depicted with documentary specificity: a mother kneels over an infant, spreading her arms in a gesture of helpless protection; a father grips a soldier's arm, trying to prevent the killing; women cluster in doorways, their mouths open in screaming. The biblical Rachel 'weeping for her children' (Jeremiah 31:15) is given a Flemish face and a Flemish village.
The contemporizing move is deliberate and radical. Bruegel's viewers in 1566-67 were experiencing the early stages of the Duke of Alba's violent repression of the Netherlands, which would eventually kill tens of thousands. The Spanish soldiers in the painting are not metaphorical: they are the soldiers his viewers had seen or heard reports of. The biblical Massacre of the Innocents - Herod's political violence against children - was happening again, in their world, against their children.
The painting was so politically explicit that later owners of certain copies had the dead children painted over as dead animals, attempting to neutralize the image's documentary force. The Windsor Castle version retains the original children.
Bruegel died in 1569, just as the worst of the Spanish repression was beginning. His painting is aone of art history's most powerful demonstrations of the biblical narrative's capacity to illuminate and condemn contemporary political atrocity. The Windsor Castle version can be seen as part of the Royal Collection; a copy is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.