Massacre of the Innocents

The Massacre of the Innocents is a religious painting that was executed by Giotto di Bondone in 1305. The painting measures 200 x 185 cm, and it's located in Arena Chapel.

The fresco illustrated here belongs to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, also called the Arena Chapel. Its near-square field contains Herod high on the left, soldiers below him, and mothers pressed together before a pale building on the right. Padova Musei records its dimensions as approximately 203 × 200 cm, correcting the smaller measurement above. ^[1] It forms part of Giotto's chapel decoration of about 1303–05; 1305 is a useful reference to that campaign rather than a separately documented completion date for this compartment. ^[2]

Another Massacre of the Innocents survives in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi. The two paintings share a subject and several arrangements, but they belong to different buildings and decorative programmes. Distinguishing them matters particularly when comparing the mothers: the Padua fresco already contains forceful gestures of resistance and lament. A simple progression from expressionless mothers to emotional ones obscures what is actually painted.

The Gospel story and the children outside the frame

Matthew places the killing after the visit of the Magi. Warned in a dream, they leave without returning to Herod; Joseph is then warned to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt. Herod orders the killing of boys aged two and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area, using the time he had established through his questioning of the Magi. Matthew follows this with Rachel's lament for her children, drawing on Jeremiah. The chapter continues through Herod's death, the family's return and their settlement in Nazareth. ^[22]

That sequence explains the startling absence at the centre of the subject: Jesus is the child whom Herod seeks, yet he is elsewhere. Giotto makes the consequences of the ruler's order fill the picture. The children on the ground and the child caught between adults give the Gospel's brief account a visible human scale. Their painted number is a compositional choice; Matthew supplies no total of victims or execution register from which such a count could be verified. ^[22]

Rachel's lament also helps explain why the mothers occupy so much of the field. They make bereavement visible alongside the soldiers' actions. Giotto presents the order and its consequences together, whereas the Gospel conveys the command without specifying that Herod personally watched the killing from a balcony. The elevated ruler is part of the picture's storytelling. ^{[1] [22]}

Padua and the Lower Church at Assisi

The Magdalen Chapel is believed to be the starting-point of Giotto's work in other areas of the Lower Church. Giotto and his assistants were hired to redecorate the transept of the vault positioned on the right side. The Massacre of the Innocents by Giotto was inspired by the incident in the New Testament when Herod ordered the execution of all two-year-old male children and below in the area of Bethlehem. The faces of the mothers in the painting are impassive and subdued due to the loss of their children, who are lying lifeless below them. A soldier and one of the mothers are engaging in a tug of war as the soldier wants to take another child and add them to the lifeless pile.

The Lower Church mentioned here is at Assisi, not Padua. Its Magdalene Chapel and transept paintings belong to the complex history of Giotto and his workshop's activity in the basilica. The basilica's current account identifies the north-transept cycle as work of Giotto and workshop, while dating the separate vault over the high altar approximately to 1315. That vault date should not be transferred automatically to an individual infancy scene. ^[23]

There is also a second soldier on the right side of that mother who is taking another child. Half of the child's head is hidden behind the soldier's body. Even with the brutal slaughter still going on, the other mothers are defeated and have numb expressionless on their faces. Around 1311, Giotto decided to paint another fresco that depicts the same scene of brutal slaughter that's almost identical when it comes to organisation. However, the mothers in the painting are portrayed differently, with their emotions clearly expressed in their anguished faces.

Although there are no 14th-century records that explain why the artist did this, some people think that Giotto may have chosen to paint another fresco after being criticised by patrons, priests, other artists or his assistants who told him the initial portrayal was false or unrealistic. It's also possible that Giotto decided to paint the scene in a different way, having chosen intentionally to paint that scene initially with numbed suffering mothers who are not showing emotion and the second time he decides to portray the mothers in anguish and clearly distraught.

The proposed criticism by patrons or colleagues is conjecture, not an established explanation of the relationship between the paintings. Neither the arrangement of their figures nor a difference in expression can establish a private decision by Giotto to correct his earlier work. The date around 1311 likewise needs qualification: the Assisi campaign's chronology and the distribution of authorship have been debated. Michael Viktor Schwarz, for example, discusses alternative chronological constructions and proposes a painter other than Giotto himself, Stefano, for the Lower Church group. His proposal is a scholarly position rather than an agreed identification. ^[24]

In both works the ruler appears in an elevated structure on the left, soldiers occupy the middle, and women and children gather to the right and below. At Padua these elements fill a tightly compressed, nearly square field. The mothers form a high, close-packed group, and the central soldier's body almost bridges the width between them and the figures under Herod.

In the Assisi version, illustrated beside Padua in Schwarz's study, the left-hand structure extends down on slender supports. Women sit beneath it, while on the right another seated woman holds a child across her lap. Larger and more elaborate buildings rise behind the action. The figures occupy less of the architectural field, leaving room for several distinct encounters. Schwarz regards the expansion as a dispersal of Padua's concentrated tension; a viewer can also follow it as an enlargement of the scene's range of mourning. ^[24]

These differences do not support calling Padua's mothers uniformly impassive. At Padua one woman stretches both hands towards the central assault; another raises an arm; faces turn towards the soldiers with open mouths. Assisi adds different positions and groupings, particularly seated figures close to the fallen children. In each work anguish has a bodily vocabulary. Whether a particular face suggests protest, shock or exhausted grief remains an interpretation, and cannot demonstrate the painter's reasons for making another version.

How Herod's command crosses the Padua picture

Herod's height creates a separation between command and physical action. He looks out from a pointed, two-bay loggia, with an arm projecting towards the street. The pale panels and sharply defined edges of the structure enclose him. Below, adults and children crowd a shallow strip of ground. The short distance down the picture from the ruler's hand to the soldiers gives the order a clear visual route.

The central soldier turns his back partly towards us. His pale grey tunic spreads across the middle, its folds following his twisted body. One arm rises while the other reaches across towards a child. The pose combines a broad, conspicuous movement with close bodily contact. Immediately behind him, a hooded figure's more angular arms contribute another set of forces. The viewer reads the scene through these interrupted diagonals: hands grasp, arms oppose one another, and bodies block easy passage across the field.

Schwarz draws a useful distinction between the two assailants. He relates the central soldier's elaborate movement to inherited figure patterns, while describing the hooded figure's angular action as more improvised. This is an argument about how Giotto constructed convincing movement from different resources, rather than proof of a surviving pattern book used on the wall. It invites close attention to the contrast between an expansive pose and a cramped, awkward action within the same event. ^[25]

The mothers supply opposing movements. Their outstretched hands run against the soldier's reach, making protection and seizure legible before one examines individual faces. At the far right, a yellow-clad man turns his back, further closing the space in front of the women. The group has nowhere visibly open to retreat. The children below the adults form a low band of pale bodies, separating the participants from the lower edge and making the cost of each continuing struggle present throughout the scene.

Giotto varies the reactions rather than giving everyone one expression. The woman on the far left lowers her head; women at the right look across or upwards; hands rise to different heights. Such distinctions allow a sustained reading without requiring a diagnosis of anyone's mental state. Schwarz himself cites the mothers' cries and tears among the chapel's emphatic expressions of emotion, an interpretation very different from treating the whole group as expressionless. ^[25]

Two buildings and an exposed street

The two architectural groups organise the painting vertically as well as horizontally. On the left, Herod's narrow loggia lifts one commanding figure above the crowd. On the right, the larger, polygonal building rises behind the mothers, its pale walls, small windows and sharply pitched roof standing against the blue field. Its stepped outline differs from the loggia's pointed bays. Together the buildings bracket the violence without providing the women with a visible shelter.

The open blue interval above the soldiers is equally active. It prevents the two structures from merging into a continuous city façade and gives the raised hand and weapon room to register. At ground level, by contrast, the overlapping bodies leave scarcely any empty space. This alternation between an open upper field and a crowded lower one makes the incident readable from a distance while retaining the pressure of close contact.

These buildings give authority and vulnerability distinct settings. The loggia isolates the ruler above the street; the larger building behind the women supplies a monumental backdrop to bodies that remain exposed. Their role in the action can be followed without identifying either as a particular surviving building.

The mothers within the chapel's larger story

A comparison with the preceding Flight into Egypt gives the mothers another significance. There, Mary carries the child who escapes Herod. Here, other women attempt to hold children who remain exposed to his power. The repeated action of holding a child connects the episodes even though their outcomes differ.

Schwarz develops this comparison through the prominent mother's originally blue mantle, which he associates with Mary's customary garment. He reads the mothers of Bethlehem as anticipating Mary's suffering, just as the murdered children were understood in Christian tradition as preceding Christ in martyrdom. This is a theological reading of the relationship between the scenes, not an identification of one of the women as Mary. ^[26]

It also gives the infant bodies a purpose beyond recording violence. For a Christian viewer following the chapel's narrative towards the Passion, the childhood scene already raises the relation between innocence, suffering and worldly power. Giotto keeps that meaning attached to tangible actions: a child held close, a hand reaching to defend, a body that can no longer be protected. The connection across the cycle grows from those recurring gestures.

Colour, surface and fresco technique

In this painting, Giotto used bright and vibrant colours such as bronze and gold to draw the attention of the viewer. The background of and landscapes on the painting are used to capture the viewer's emotions. The faces of the figures in the painting also draw the attention of viewers as they show their emotion. The hairstyle and clothes of the people in the painting fit the time period of the painting.

The colours are most useful when followed through the composition. The central assailant’s broad grey tunic stands between warm pink and yellow garments on the left and the worn blue mantle among the mothers on the right. Pale architecture continues above them, while the darker blue background separates the bodies and buildings from the upper field. Calling a colour bronze or gold does not establish that bronze metal or gilding was applied. Nor do the costumes collectively provide a literal record of clothing in first-century Bethlehem: they belong to the painted means by which a medieval audience could recognise bodies, status and action.

This technique of mural painting was executed on wet lime or freshly-lid plaster. Water was used as the means for the dry-powder paint to merge with the plaster. Giotto had a strong influence when it comes to the development of art in Italy. Many painters from Italy were influenced by Giotto's work including Altichiero, Giusto de' Menabuoi and Jacopo Avanzi.

Fresco painting uses a lime-plaster ground, but the term should not make every painted detail seem the product of one uniform wet-plaster operation. In another Scrovegni scene, the Expulsion of the Merchants, Padova Musei specifically describes part of a painted table as executed in fresco and part a secco, on dry plaster. ^[27] This establishes that both procedures belong to the chapel's practice; it does not identify the precise technique or pigment of any selected patch in the Massacre.

The Scrovegni Chapel looking towards the entrance wall in a 2017 photograph: the Last Judgement closes the interior, with narrative tiers at either side beneath the blue vault. Derbrauni. Image source. CC BY-SA 4.0. Proportionally reduced reproduction; original composition, colour and photographic lighting retained.

The surface seen today also carries the effects of time and care. The chapel underwent a general restoration between July 2001 and March 2002, followed by monitoring and planned maintenance. ^[28] A small reproduction can show worn colour and surviving outlines, but it cannot by itself distinguish every original passage from later intervention or determine the chemistry of a blue. Close looking is most productive here when it returns to what remains clear across those limitations: Herod's isolated command above, the soldiers' opposing movements below, and the mothers' persistent attempts to hold their children.