Scene of the massacre of the Innocents

Title: Scene of the massacre of the Innocents
Artist: Léon Cogniet
Medium: Oil on fabric
Size: 265 X 235 cm
Date: 1824
Location: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.

Matthew 2:16-18: When Herod realized that the Magi left and had not reported back to him as requested, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Matthew does not simply report the murder of the children of Bethlehem dispassionately; he chooses an ancient lament from one of the most sorrowful times of his people's history. Jeremiah 31:15 speaks of Rachel weeping for her children, poetically describing the favored mother of Benjamin (standing for all Judah) mourning because her descendants were led into exile. Rachel, who wept from her grave in Bethlehem during the captivity, was now weeping at another, nearer crisis significant in salvation history.

Where medieval and renaissance painters showed mayhem and murder, Cogniet shows only fear. He favored a fragmented, anecdotal take on this event rather than a broad descriptive composition. This Scene of the massacre of the innocent is without any doubt the masterpiece of Leon Cogniet. The work is made up in two plans: with the first this mother and her child, a mass painful rebalanced by the wall in ruins advancing in front of the composition. In the second plan, the massacre animated in a severe light erases the shapes of the characters. The woman with the dilated and dark eyes, offers the synthesis of an ideal beauty and a commonplace realism. Cogniet treated the foreground in a harmony of colors gray, beige, black, and blues.

Léon Cogniet (August 1794 –November 1880) was a French historical and portrait painter. he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin at the same time as Delacroix and Géricault. In 1817 he won the Prix de Rome and was a resident at the Villa Medici from 1817 to 1822.

The Massacre of the Innocents

Title: The Massacre of the Innocents

Artist: Guido Reni

Medium: Oil on canvas

Size: 268 x 170 cm

Date: 1611

Location: Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna

The Massacre of the Innocents is an episode of mass infanticide by the King of Judea, Herod the Great, which appears in the Gospel of Matthew 2:16-18. King Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi. Like much of Matthew's gospel, the incident is advanced as the fulfillment of passages in the Old Testament read as prophecies. The slaughtered infants, known as the Holy Innocents, have been claimed as the first Christian martyrs.

This depiction of events is rendered as bathed in light, but set before a landscape with dark and heavy architecture. A group of eight adults and eight children (including the putti distributing the palm fronds of victory) has been skillfully arranged. The unusual vertical format, rarely used for this theme, and above all the symmetrical structure of figural counterparts indicate that Reni was particularly interested in a specific problem of composition: that of achieving a balance between centripetal and centrifugal movement while combining them in a static pictorial structure. Reni also seeks to achieve this equilibrium in his expression of effects and in the distribution of color accents.

Guido Reni (4 November 1575 – 18 August 1642) was a prominent Italian painter of high-Baroque style. He was constantly seeking an absolute, rarefied perfection which he measured against classical Antiquity and Raphael. Because of this, over the years the Bolognese painter has been in and out of fashion, depending on the tastes of the times. The eighteenth century loved him, the nineteenth century, persuaded by the violent criticism of John Ruskin, hated him. But even his detractors cannot deny the exceptional technical quality of his work or the clarity of his supremely assured and harmonious brushwork.