Tag: Massacre of the Innocents

The Advance of Maleficence

~ The Koboi Project

The Massacre of the Innocents (detail) is one of a 36 paintings on 4 panels, the majority of which are by Fra Angelico, in the Museo di San Marco, Florence. This extensive series includes another painting addressing the Lex Amoris doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which arguably sets the theme for the series as a whole. This doctrine is articulated in the inscription on this painting, “Christ did not come to me to destroy the old laws of the patriarchs, but to renew and complete them with a new Law of Love.” Perhaps, the Massacre of the Innocents, underscores by antithesis, the essential New Testament principle of love.

In this primordial image of slaughter, a group of soldiers is represented impassively working its way across the scene, effortlessly slitting the throats of babes in the arms of their desperate mothers who, despite their bodily resistance, are soon to be completely overwhelmed. Viewed abstractly, a solid mass of darkness advances from left to right with strong momentum and at a steady pace, portending the imminent extinguishment of all light and color in the image. In the latest reprise of this archetypal act of inhumanity, 8,663 Gazan children have been slaughtered (UpdatedDecember 19) in an equally malefic military movement, a movement that Norman Finkelstein might describe, after Israeli sources, as ‘mowing the lawn.‘

See also:

Grace in the Face of Suffering

Netanyahu channels King Herod!

Le Massacre des Innocents

Witness to Slaughter

Image: https://scottdodge.blogspot.com/2010/12/feast-of-holy-innocents-martyrs.html

http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/fraangelico/armadiodegliargenti.htm

https://fraangelicoinstitute.com/2018/05/27/fra-angelico-and-the-armadio-degli-argenti-part-3-of-the-heaven-on-earth-exhibition/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-israel-mowing-the-lawn-in-gaza/

Netanyahu channels King Herod!

~ The Koboi Project

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