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Every time I make a trip to the Museum, I visit this painting. The stunning quality of the work never fails to stop me in my tracks. The portrayal of the devastation of King Herod’s tyranny is summed up in this vibrant masterpiece. The intensity of the color and the detail of each individual down to the hair ornaments and jewelry pull the observer in to the moment. The despair felt by the forlorn mother as she holds her slaughtered child in her arm and the fear of the woman behind her in anxiously trying to quiet a miraculously unharmed infant. The innocence of the victims depicted by the alabaster tones of their skin, while in the background there is some suggestion of the evil that continues on. This symbolic scene could be one of thousands that occurred during King Herod’s paranoid attempt to prevent the fulfilling of a prophesy. The power of this portrait is that whenever the story of King Herod is discussed this “snapshot” has become the reference image that comes to mind
In seeing the results of the Biblical influence in the great world masterpieces, I can only think that the power of the art is a direct result of the artist’s ability to transfer the power of the text to canvass.
I thought the massacre of the innocents referred to in the New Testament was about the murder of newborn boys, similar to the Exodus story of Moses. In this painting, the murdered child is an
ReplyDeleteadolescent girl, clearly not a newborn boy. So this painting must be
a generic comment on innocent victims of murder and not the biblical
story that Jenielle cites.