The Massacre of the Innocents (Giotto)

Learning from the wise men that a king had been born in Bethlehem, the jealous King Herod ordered every male infant in the town killed - the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16-18). Giotto stages the horror with restraint: Herod gestures from his balcony as soldiers wrench babies from their mothers, who twist and claw to hold them, and a heap of small bodies gathers below. The cruelty reads through gesture rather than gore, carried by the mothers' contorted faces. It is among the most wrenching scenes of his Arena Chapel cycle in Padua, where Giotto gave sacred drama an unprecedented human weight.