At the dawn of the humanist epoch, the great pioneer of spatial, physical, and psychological realism, Giotto di Bondone, painted a fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel, in Padua, which which presents the story of Christ. Arguably, the perspectival acuity, the modeling of masses, and the emotional expressionism that would come to characterize the Italian Renaissance found its first consolidated realization in this celebrated cycle. Descending from the anagogical abstractions of Medieval art, to engage in an empathetic somatic and psychic sensibility of Humanism, the panels of Giotto’s cycle must have given contemporary viewers an unprecedented impression of the Biblical narrative as being couched in the moral and ethical realities of earthly life.
One striking image here is ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ (detail) which represents King Herod’s men slaughtering all male children, 2 years old and below, in Bethlehem. As the slaughter ensues, a collection of lifeless children builds into a central heap, as if Giotto were presenting both the physical evidence and the statistical data of the event, all in one visualization. Although the representation of the mothers in this image is thought to have received contemporaneous criticism for being impassive, subdued, numb, and expressionless, I find the stunned stillness of this image more profound and moving than the later more expressive version in Lower Church, Assisi, also believed to be from the artist’s hand.
Not unlike Herod, whose indiscriminate slaughter was based on the uncertainty about the identity of the infant King of the Jews, whom he feared would usurp him one day; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to justify his collateral slaughter of innocents based on their geolocational inseparability from the constituents of his own dreaded nemesis – Hamas. UPDATE: The number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza stands at 8,663 (this figure is an estimate as of December 19).
See Also
Le Massacre des Innocents
Grace in the Face of Suffering
The Advance of Maleficence
Witness to Slaughter
Image: https://gallerix.org/storeroom/146947004/N/2469/
Image: https://betweentwocities.com/2017/03/19/giottos-two-views-of-the-massacre-of-the-innocents/
https://www.thehistoryofart.org/giotto/massacre-of-the-innocents/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-trackerI
The Koboi Project 
You must be logged in to post a comment.