Le Massacre des Innocents

The Gospel of Saint Matthew relates that King Herod, warned by the Magi that a child destined to become king of the Jews was born in Bethlehem, had all the boys under two years of age in the region killed; Jesus was saved by the flight of his family into Egypt. Nicolas Poussin depicts the dramatic episode in a composition of terrifying clarity — the soldiers seizing the children from their mothers’ arms, the women crying out and struggling in the half-light of the palace court, the architecture closing like a trap around the massacre. Painted between 1626 and 1627, at the beginning of his Roman career, it shows the young Poussin already mastering the controlled violence and sculptural gravity of his classicism. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.