Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), The Massacre of the Innocents, 1565-67, oil on panel, 111 x 160 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. See next pistures for details.
Like in his painting, The Census at Bethlehem (see previous picture), it can be assumed that also here Bruegel made a similar political statement, pointing the finger at the Spanish atrocities in his country under the reign of terror of emperor Philip II of Spain. Like in The Census, Bruegel therefore incorporates a biblical event into the country’s tumultuous 1560s.
After hearing of the birth of Jesus, who was to become the new King of the Jews, thus replacing him, King Herod ordered that all newborn boys in Bethlehem should be murdered. But Bruegel painted the biblical scene of massacre in a typical and snow-covered Brabant village and the soldiers invading Bethlehem are dressed in the distinctive clothing of the Spanish army and their German mercenaries.
Babies are taken from their mother’s arms, distraught women lament the murder of their babies and at the extreme right soldiers are looting a house, while a mercenary is kicking down the door, a second man assisting with a battering ram. In the middle, soldiers are stabbing babies with their lances, while women run off in horror. To the left of this scene, a couple tries to negotiate with a soldier, not to take their baby son but their daughter instead. To the right, a group of villagers implore a young, well-dressed horseman, to intervene in the stabbing. On the foreground, people are begging a soldier to stop the butchering, one of them kneeling beside the soldier’s horse, while to the far left, a mercenary pursues a fleeing mother and child. In the background, a group of heavily armed cavalrymen is supervising the slaughter, led by a white-bearded, black-clad man in the centre of the group, undoubtedly a reference to the Duke of Alba.
The painting was finished in 1567 and late in the same year the Duke of Alba was sent to the Netherlands with 10,000 soldiers to crush the Protestant resistance and restore Catholicism. Earlier, following Calvinist riots in 1566, Philip II of Spain had threatened that he rather would sacrifice a lot of his army people than tolerate the Dutch heresy and would send the Duke to suppress the rebellion. It is symptomatic that shortly before his death, Bruegel instructed his wife to burn all the copies of paintings and drawings that might induce the state to prosecute his family. (Karel Van Mander, Het Schilderboek, 1604, Utrecht). The political message of Bruegel was a premonition of a probably imminent Spanish oppression of people of The Netherlands’.
