by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
A city filled with resistance
Peter Paul Rubens spreads the violence of The Massacre of the Innocents across a broad public space. At the left, bodies press against one another near ruined masonry. A woman in dark clothing occupies the centre, arms raised between the opposing groups. At the right, more figures struggle before a tall architectural façade. The eye does not settle on one hero or one attacker. It moves from a fallen child to a mother's outstretched hand, then to men forcing their way through the crowd. Rubens makes the event feel as if it continues beyond the edges of the painting.
This is the later Munich painting, dated around 1638 by the Bavarian State Painting Collections[1]. It is an unusually wide oak panel, 198.5 × 302.2 centimetres, now in the Alte Pinakothek, inventory 572. Its support matters: a description of this particular work as an oil painting on canvas would be wrong. Rubens had treated the same biblical subject decades earlier in the smaller picture now in Toronto. The two works share a title and story, but they are different objects with different compositions and histories.
The Munich panel's width gives the crowd room to break into several knots of action. The architecture behind the figures suggests an inhabited town rather than an empty arena. Above it, open sky and airborne figures widen the scene still further. Rubens arranges near and far groups so that a viewer cannot take in the whole event at once. The most immediate gestures—grasping arms, twisting bodies, a woman trying to hold a child—draw attention back down from the monumental setting to people facing a sudden attack.
At a Glance
- ArtistPeter Paul Rubens [1]
- DateAround 1638 [1]
- MediumOil on oak panel [1]
- Dimensions198.5 × 302.2 cm [1]
- CollectionAlte Pinakothek, Munich, inventory 572 [1]
Where this work sits in Rubens's career
The Elevation of the Cross
1609–10The Descent from the Cross
1611–14The Garden of Love
1630–35The Three Graces
1630–35Contents
- What story is being painted?
- Mothers, attackers and the Laocoön comparison
- Could this have warned rulers?
- How is this different from the Toronto painting?
- The later composition beyond Rubens's panel
What story is being painted?
The subject comes from Matthew 2:16–18[3]. In that account, Herod orders the killing of young children in and around Bethlehem after hearing of a child described as the future king of the Jews. The passage also invokes the grief of Rachel weeping for her children. Rubens paints the result of the order rather than Herod issuing it. The ruler is absent from the visible struggle; his power is felt through the men carrying it out and through the families trying to stop them.
The biblical text gives the narrative framework, but it does not identify the individual people in Rubens's crowd. Their clothing, gestures and positions belong to the painter's staging of an episode of collective violence. The woman at the centre raises both arms; others bend toward children or lunge at attackers. These are not passive witnesses arranged to illustrate a verse. They respond in different ways to danger. The variety makes the massacre a human conflict, even though the order behind it is presented as absolute.
The painting is painful to examine. Looking carefully does not require treating the children as decorative details or praising the scene's energy without acknowledging its subject. Rubens puts the vulnerable figures and the adults' attempts to protect them in the foreground. The painting's movement makes those attempts hard to separate from the violence they resist. That tension is part of its meaning: the mothers act with force, but their struggle does not cancel the order imposed upon them.
Mothers, attackers and the Laocoön comparison
The Munich collection's interpretation[1] draws attention to both the mothers' apparently hopeless fight and their anger. It compares their attack on one man with the fury of mythological Furies. The comparison need not mean that Rubens painted the mothers as supernatural beings. It describes the intensity of their response and the way he gives them physical agency within the image. They pull, brace and reach across the panel rather than standing outside the event to lament it.
The same museum sees an echo of the ancient Laocoön sculpture in the pose of the man they attack. The famous group of Laocoön and his sons was admired in Rubens's time as an expression of bodily pain. In Munich's reading, the man's twisting body carries a related visual force. This is a formal comparison offered by the collection, not evidence that a particular surviving Rubens drawing was made for this exact figure. What matters within the painting is how his turned body locks the women's movements together: several forces meet in one place.
Rubens also distributes emotional weight outside that central struggle. Figures crouch and fall at the lower edge, while others reach upward or recoil before the architecture. No single face can stand for every family. At a distance, the panel may register as a sweep of bodies and colour; closer looking reveals smaller, interrupted acts of defence. The width allows those different scales of attention. The viewer first sees a public catastrophe and then encounters individual people within it.
Could this have warned rulers?
The Bavarian State Painting Collections[1] notes that the subject was suitable for civic buildings: it could show the consequences of bad rule and urge governors to act justly and moderately. That interpretation makes sense of Herod's absence. The ruler's decision has taken physical form in a city full of suffering, so viewers can consider power by looking at what it does to its subjects. The thought has a political force without making every painted soldier a portrait of a contemporary official.
The museum's statement concerns the subject's possible civic use, not a documented town-hall commission for this specific panel. A later print identifies an early owner, Antoine de Tassis, an Antwerp canon; that is firmer than a guessed building but does not establish the exact terms of Rubens's original commission. The panel later entered the Munich collection from the Electoral Gallery, which the museum records under acquisition. A civic interpretation, an early owner and a later princely collection are different kinds of evidence. None alone tells us where the painting first hung.
The picture's size would have made it commanding in any room. A panel more than three metres wide asks the viewer to follow action across it, from damaged architecture and sky to the bodies pressed against its lower edge. Rubens uses that scale to make the biblical episode public rather than private. The first question is not which one person to identify, but how a whole community is overtaken by a ruler's command.
The painting's present frame belongs to a later chapter of that public life. The Munich object record[1] attributes it to Joseph Effner, dates it to the first third of the eighteenth century, and gives Munich as its place of manufacture. The frame therefore cannot be evidence for how Rubens or de Tassis displayed the panel around 1638–43. It does show that the work acquired a new physical setting during its later collecting history. Keeping the frame date distinct from the painting date is especially useful here because a monumental panel and its surround can look like one original ensemble to a visitor.
A related drawing in the Louvre
The Louvre catalogues a drawing by Rubens[9] of a young woman turned to the right with both arms raised, INV 20198, recto, as related to the Munich Massacre. It is a large sheet, 48 × 28.5 centimetres, made in black and red chalk. The catalogue's formulation matters: it records a connection to the painting, without identifying a particular figure in the finished crowd or declaring that the sheet is a final, approved study for the panel. Nor does its public record supply a precise drawing date. The figure's raised arms nevertheless make the sheet a useful companion to a painting in which women reach, resist and appeal across the pictorial space.
The Louvre's older inventory described the figure as a kneeling woman and called the work a drawing in three chalks. The current object fields specify black and red chalk and title the figure more generally. Those descriptions show how a drawing can acquire different emphases in successive catalogues; they should not be combined into a claim about a pose or medium that the present record does not confirm. The sheet has also had a separate museum life: the Louvre lists it in exhibitions of Rubens drawings in 1959 and 1978. This is evidence for the composition's study and later reception, rather than evidence that the Munich painting was commissioned for a particular room.
How is this different from the Toronto painting?
Rubens's earlier Massacre of the Innocents is now in the Art Gallery of Ontario. The AGO dates that panel to about 1610 and measures it at 142 × 183 centimetres. Its action is compressed into a tight foreground group; a few bodies and gestures carry most of the visual pressure. Munich's later, larger panel spreads the episode among many groups across a town setting. The contrast is visible without claiming that the later painting is a preparatory expansion of the earlier one.
The institutions and inventory numbers keep the works apart: Munich 572 and Toronto 2014/1581. Their compositions also differ. A catalogue detail or ownership story from one cannot be moved to the other simply because both bear the same English title. They are two answers by Rubens to the same biblical subject at different stages of his career. Each asks the viewer to follow a different pattern of resistance, fear and violence.
The later composition beyond Rubens's panel
A print names an early owner
The inscription on Paulus Pontius's 1643 engraving is a rare early witness to the Munich composition's ownership. The University of Tübingen's print record[6] transcribes a dedication made by Antoine de Tassis, canon of Antwerp, to Antonius Triest, bishop of Ghent. It says that the painting serving as the print's model was among de Tassis's valued possessions. The words identify an early owner by 1643, three years after Rubens's death, but do not establish where the painting hung. They do not say that Triest owned the picture: he was the recipient of the print's dedication. Nor do they settle whether de Tassis commissioned the painting or acquired it afterward. This evidence refines the Munich museum's general civic reading without replacing it with an unsupported town-hall story.
The same transcribed inscription[6] tells a seventeenth-century spectator how to look. It calls attention to cruelty against innocent infants, mothers raising complaints to heaven, anger visible in eyes, cries in mouths and strength in hands. It then places the violence under a tyrant's order and contrasts Herod's attempt to kill the infant Christ with the blood Christ would later shed for humanity. This is a contemporary reading attached to Pontius's print, not text painted across Rubens's panel or a statement in Rubens's own hand. It gives unusually specific evidence for the moral and devotional language in which the late composition circulated soon after the artist's death. The inscription notices both the women's physical resistance and the theological sequence that the painting itself leaves for viewers to infer.
The engraving itself was substantial. A Rijksmuseum impression[7] was printed from two plates and has a recorded plate-mark size of about 62.5 × 92.2 centimetres. Pontius's dated print is an object of 1643, not a painting Rubens made in that year. Its size and two-sheet construction allowed much of the broad Munich design to circulate on paper. The Plantin-Moretus Museum's catalogue[8] calls attention to angels scattering rose petals above the dead children and to the central woman raising a bloodstained cloth. In that museum's reading, those details introduce a hope of divine care amid the violence. This interpretation is grounded in the late composition and the print; it should not be transferred to Rubens's compressed Toronto panel.
The Plantin-Moretus catalogue also makes a geographical slip, placing the Alte Pinakothek in Vienna. The painting's holding museum[1] and inventory 572 establish Munich. This is why the print catalogue can be used for its own object and carefully qualified interpretation while the holding museum remains the authority for the painting's present location and material.
A painting catalogued by Sotheby's as a work by Victor Wolfvoet the Younger after Rubens[5] records another stage in the Munich composition's history. The smaller copy is on copper and repeats the later, broad Massacre design. Sotheby's identifies the Munich panel, inventory 572, as its source and dates Rubens's second treatment to about 1638. It also records changing attributions for the copy itself. These facts concern a derivative object and cannot be used to reassign the authorship of the Munich original.
The existence of that copy shows that the late composition circulated beyond the large panel now in Munich. A smaller painting after it could carry the crowded scene into another collection and allow a viewer to know its design without seeing the monumental original. It also demonstrates why titles alone are hazardous here: Rubens painted two distinct Massacres, and other artists made works after his designs. The image, support, size, date and holding record are needed to decide which object a source describes. A record for Wolfvoet's copper copy belongs neither to the Toronto panel nor to Munich's own material description.
The Munich painting also sits at a late point in Rubens's career. Comparing it with Toronto is most useful when the differences remain concrete. Toronto's figures form a tight foreground collision in a much smaller field; Munich's actors occupy several groups and an architectural setting. The later work lets the viewer move between public space and individual resistance. It is possible to call that a change of pictorial scale and narrative distribution. The two museum records do not establish that Rubens designed the Munich panel by enlarging the Toronto picture, so the comparison should stop short of a documented development sequence.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Munich holds Rubens's broad panel dated around 1638, inventory 572. The Art Gallery of Ontario holds a distinct, smaller panel dated about 1610, object 2014/1581.
No. The Bavarian State Painting Collections record its support as oak panel and its image size as 198.5 × 302.2 centimetres.
The painting shows the attack on families ordered by Herod in Matthew's account. It does not need to show the ruler himself for his command to shape the scene.
The Munich museum says the subject could serve as a warning against unjust rule in civic settings. Its public record does not establish a town hall commission for this particular panel.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections hold it at Munich's Alte Pinakothek as inventory 572.
Discussion
Look closely at how Rubens spreads resistance and grief across the wide panel.
Share an observation about the painting or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
Which group first catches your eye, and how does Rubens lead you to the next?
How do the mothers' actions change the scene from simple lament to resistance?
What can Munich's civic warning interpretation tell us without assuming a town hall commission?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- Bavarian State Painting Collections, The Massacre of the Innocents , Munich object record and interpretation. View source
- Bavarian State Painting Collections, Der bethlehemitische Kindermord , German collection record. View source
- New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Matthew 2:16–18. View source
- Art Gallery of Ontario, The Massacre of the Innocents , Toronto object record. View source
- Sotheby's, Victor Wolfvoet the Younger, The Massacre of the Innocents, after Rubens , catalogue note identifying the Munich composition. View source
- University of Tübingen, Pontius's 1643 engraving and full Latin dedication naming Antoine de Tassis's painted original. View source
- Rijksmuseum, two-plate impression of Pontius's engraving. View source
- Plantin-Moretus Museum, History Painting , catalogue interpretation of Pontius's print. View source
- Musée du Louvre, Rubens, Young woman with raised arms , INV 20198, recto, catalogued in relation to the Munich painting. View source
