The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 2)

Rubens returns to the slaughter of Bethlehem's infants in this later panel, the soldiers and desperate mothers locked once more in a writhing knot of muscle and grief (Matthew 2). Now in Munich's Alte Pinakothek, it lets the viewer measure his evolving hand against his ferocious earlier version of the same subject, which is also in this collection. The fury is undimmed but the touch is broader and more fluent, the late Rubens orchestrating bodies in violent motion with the confidence of a master who had made such mass and movement his signature.