The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 1)

Herod's soldiers fall upon the infants of Bethlehem in a writhing knot of muscular bodies - mothers clawing and screaming, babies wrenched away, killers trampling the dead (Matthew 2). Rubens turns the massacre into a churning, almost sculptural tangle of violence and maternal fury, classical in its nude forms but unbearable in its cruelty. Long under-recognized, the panel sold in 2002 for a record price and is now in Toronto. It shows the young master at his most ferocious, marshaling the full Baroque machinery of bodies in motion to depict atrocity.