Massacre of the Innocents 1565

Image scanned via the Sunday Times - click to enlarge

Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This painting belongs to the Royal Collection and is currently in an exhibition called: The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein which is being held in the Queen's Gallery, London.

There is something rather strange about both the painting and its title. Looking closely at it there are very few signs of the Massacre of the Innocents.

According to St. Matthew's Gospel, after hearing from the wise men of the birth of Jesus, King Herod ordered that all children in Bethlehem under the age of two should be murdered.
Painted by Bruegel in 1565, it originally depicted one of the Bible's darkest moments.
Look closely at the painting and you will not find any innocents being massacred. Where have the dead babies gone? Where is the blood, the viscera, the gore? It is all hidden under the delightfully painted snow. Following its completion the painting was bought by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and it was Rudolf who decided that the events depicted were too ghastly for him, and too easily mistaken for actual events in his empire. So he had the innocents painted out. Following the removal of the babies the painting was acquired by the English monarch, King Charles II, and it has remained in the Royal Collection ever since. In 1621 the painting was renamed A Village Plundering. The old women on the left crying over some loaves of bread in the snow? Those loaves were originally dead babies. See the calf by the barrel in the foreground, having its throat slit? That was originally a baby.  The wild boar being lanced just below the group of mounted soldiers? That was a baby too. Every bundle carried by every wailing mother was originally a baby. The swan that a soldier is carrying by the neck, to the left of centre - that was a baby. You can view a video from the BBC of Christopher Lloyd talking about The Massacre of the Innocents here

Apart from snow paintings done by the Bruegel family, have you ever considered how few snow paintings there are?

Britain's finest landscape painters - Constable and Gainsborough - neither of them painted a snow scene. Turner, however, did paint and sketch in the Alps using his paper to be the snow as with Japanese woodcuts, and he also painted a "Snow Storm". Poussin never painted snow nor did Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt or Velazquez. There is no snow in a Canaletto, no medieval snow, no gothic snow, no renaissance snow, no snow in all the years of rococo. The entire enlightenment was enlightened enough to avoid it. Why? Technically, painting snow is notoriously challenging. 
The best and most determined painters of snow were the impressionists who understood the complex colour issues that are involved in creating it. 
For me the most accomplished painter of snow is Camille Pissarro. I also admire the more contemporary snow paintings of Welsh painter Kyffin Williams 1918 - 2006. One or two commenters have mentioned the Canadian Group of Seven and their snow paintings. They are a group that I also admire, and I have now included a painting by Tom Thomson of the Group of Seven.

Camille Pissarro - road to Versailles, Louveciennes, near Paris  (note the clever artists touch of a small splash of red in the middle of the painting) 

Camille Pissarro - Foxhill, Upper Norwood, south east London 

Kyffin Williams - The gathering - Farmers on Glyder - the sixth highest mountain in Wales 

Tryfan No. 2 - a mountain in the Ogwen Valley, Snowdonia, Wales.

Tom Thomson, one of the Canadian Group of Seven 

via wikipedia

Some information used courtesy Waldemar Januszczak, Art Critic, after an article in the Sunday Times