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 struggle forced into the foreground
In Peter Paul Rubens's Toronto Massacre of the Innocents, people struggle so close together that their bodies seem to leave little space for escape. A woman in red bends over a child near the front. Behind her, men push through the crowd. At the right, another figure rises sharply against the dark edge of the scene. The figures overlap so tightly that a viewer must work to understand which arm belongs to which person. That difficulty is part of the painting's effect: the attack has broken ordinary distance between people and brought danger into the foreground.
The Art Gallery of Ontario[1] identifies this as an oil painting on panel, dated about 1610. The panel measures 142 × 183 centimetres, with a recorded thickness of 1.9 centimetres. It belongs to the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, object 2014/1581. Those facts separate it from Rubens's much larger, later painting of the same subject in Munich. The Toronto work is wide, but its drama is concentrated into a few interlocking groups rather than spread across an entire town.
At the left, buildings and pale sky open a view beyond the foreground. That distant space hardly softens the scene because the people nearest us occupy so much of the painted surface. Light falls across exposed bodies and the woman's bright red clothing. Darker figures behind them press forward. Rubens uses abrupt changes of light and direction to make the viewer search through the group, returning repeatedly to the adults trying to shield children.
At a Glance
- ArtistPeter Paul Rubens [1]
- DateAround 1610 [1]
- MediumOil on panel [1]
- Dimensions142 × 183 cm [1]
- CollectionArt Gallery of Ontario, Thomson Collection, 2014/1581 [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
- Why are the children in danger?
- How does Rubens organize the crowd?
- A biblical scene after Antwerp's wars
- The Italian education behind an Antwerp painting
- How a lost attribution returned
- Which Massacre of the Innocents is this?
Why are the children in danger?
The story is told in Matthew 2:16–18[3]. After the magi do not return to Herod, he orders the death of young children in and around Bethlehem, fearing the child they sought as a rival king. Matthew follows the order with a passage about Rachel weeping for her children. Rubens paints neither the magi nor Herod making his decision. He chooses the assault on families, leaving the ruler's command to be understood through its consequences.
That distinction prevents the scene from becoming a portrait of one tyrant. The people in the painting are not individual figures named in Matthew's account. Rubens gives them weight and urgency through their gestures: a parent curls around a child, a man lunges, another body twists away. The biblical source establishes what has happened; the image explores what such an order means at the level of bodies caught together in a street.
The subject is harrowing. Close looking should not make the dead and threatened children into merely clever compositional devices. The painting's strong diagonals and bright passages pull the eye, but they also direct it toward people being hurt and people fighting to protect them. Rubens's skill lies partly in refusing to let the viewer stand outside the conflict. Every turn of a figure reveals another person drawn into it.
How does Rubens organize the crowd?
The group is built from bodies moving in opposed directions. A raised arm at the right pulls upward; a bent figure in red anchors the lower centre; figures entering from the left drive into them. Hands grasp shoulders, cloth and children. Because one gesture interrupts another, the viewer follows the struggle in fragments rather than reading it as a neat procession from left to right. The open street behind the figures gives a measure of depth, but the most forceful action remains pressed against the picture plane.
Colour helps distinguish forms without making the scene orderly. Red fabric at the front marks a mother within the tangle. Flesh tones shift from bright light to deep shadow as figures turn. Rubens places bare arms and legs against darker clothing and architecture, so that movement can be read even when the figures overlap. The contrast is functional: it lets the viewer see grasping hands and threatened children in a scene that could otherwise become an indistinct mass.
The AGO's Early Rubens exhibition[2] placed this panel among works produced after the artist returned to Antwerp from Italy in 1608. That context helps explain its forceful arrangement and Rubens's renewed work in the city, but it does not require every painted figure to stand for a documented Antwerp resident. The visual reading can remain specific to the panel while the exhibition supplies a wider historical setting.
A biblical scene after Antwerp's wars
The AGO has suggested that the painting could have resonated with memories of religious warfare among Antwerp's citizens. Its exhibition account[2] speaks of collective trauma as a way to read the work's urgency. This is a curatorial interpretation, not a surviving statement from Rubens that he intended a direct allegory of one named battle or massacre. The painting's subject is Herod's biblical order; its early seventeenth-century viewers also lived in a world where violence against civilians was not abstract.
Rubens's return from Italy in 1608 coincided with a period of relative peace for Antwerp, as the AGO notes. The city's recent experience could have shaped how a subject of attacked families was received. Yet a painting can speak to contemporary fears without being a coded report of a recent local event. The adults' protective gestures and the children placed among them are powerful because they are particular actions within the picture, not because each corresponds to a known person outside it.
The AGO's exhibition made the Toronto panel a central work in Rubens's early Antwerp career. Its current object record[1] supplies the secure modern identity and catalogue details.
The Italian education behind an Antwerp painting
The AGO's 2019 exhibition account[2] places the work after Rubens's eight years of study and painting in Italy. It describes his engagement with ancient sculpture, Renaissance painting and the art of his own time before his return to Antwerp in 1608. This background changes how one can look at the Toronto panel. Its large, forceful bodies are not only a response to a violent biblical story; they are also a test of how much action can be held within a shallow, tightly joined figure group. The AGO's exhibition announcement[6] characterizes the work as bringing Italian drama together with Flemish realism and reads it as an anti-war statement. Those are curatorial descriptions, not a written programme left by Rubens.
The Rubens House's account of its 2018 loan[5] makes a more precise visual comparison. It relates the pale bodies of children in the panel to a Roman sculpture of three sleeping putti that Rubens had seen at the Villa Borghese. The comparison is unsettling because a form learned from sleeping children is used to portray death. It also shows why an antique source need not dictate a painting's meaning: Rubens adapted a studied pose to a different and tragic subject. The Rubens House calls this part of the young painter's learned practice, while the scene itself keeps the viewers' attention on the mothers' failed attempts to protect their children.
The same museum identifies several other possible sources for particular bodies. It compares the crouching mother with an antique Venus in the Gonzaga collection at Mantua, the soldier threatening an older woman with the Wrestlers at the Villa Medici, and the soldier whose eyes are clawed with the Laocoön group, which Rubens had drawn in Rome. At the right, it connects a soldier raising a child against masonry with a figure in Michelangelo's Resurrection. These comparisons help explain how Rubens built a violent scene from forms he had studied for other purposes. They are the Rubens House's visual identifications, not surviving notes in which Rubens itemized the models for this panel. The sharpest reversal may be Michelangelo's figure: a gesture associated with Christ's victory over death becomes the movement of a man bringing death to a child.
Antwerp and printed models also enter that account. The museum notes that Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael made a Renaissance Massacre composition widely available, while the diagonal architecture behind Rubens's figures resembles a treatment by the Antwerp painter Frans Floris. The comparison is useful because it resists a single-source story. Rubens could draw on Roman sculpture, Italian painting, a circulating print and a local predecessor while making a composition whose compressed foreground is his own. None of these parallels alone proves a direct borrowing at every point, but together they clarify why the scene can look both learned and immediate.
How a lost attribution returned
The present museum identification has a history. According to the Rubens House[5], the painting was attributed to other masters from the eighteenth century and was recognized as Rubens's work again in 2001. It was then sold at Sotheby's in London in 2002 for £49.5 million. Ken Thomson acquired it and donated it to the Art Gallery of Ontario. That history is specific to this Toronto panel; it is not the provenance of the later Munich Massacre.
The attribution story matters beyond the auction price. If a painting is catalogued under another name, its place in Rubens's early career can become difficult to see even while the object survives. Its reassessment made the panel available for fresh comparison with his work after Italy, and its eventual public ownership made it accessible to museum audiences. The AGO's current record presents Rubens as the creator and dates the panel about 1610; the earlier errors belong to its cataloguing history, not to a current alternative attribution endorsed by the AGO.
A newly published National Gallery catalogue study of Samson and Delilah[7] supplies a documented chapter of this painting's earlier collection history. The two Rubens works were in the Liechtenstein collection, but the London study does not establish that they shared a first owner in Antwerp. In Vincenzo Fanti's 1767 catalogue, the Toronto Massacre was assigned to Frans de Neve. A later hanging plan for the Liechtenstein Garden Palace placed it on the same wall as Samson and Delilah; by that stage both were labelled Jan van den Hoecke and valued at the same amount. Their neighbouring display shows how a collector could possess two paintings by Rubens while understanding both through different artists' names. It helps explain the long interruption in the Toronto panel's recognition without implying that a change of label altered the panel itself.
The collection's earlier response was not simply unbroken admiration followed by a wrong label. The National Gallery's research cites 1698 correspondence in which the prince initially viewed the Massacre unfavourably because it appeared to belong to Rubens's early manner; a later acquisition followed. That episode shows an early patron making a judgment about style before the eighteenth-century reattributions. It should not be inflated into a rejection of Rubens's authorship, or made into a precise purchase date. The secure lesson is that the same painting could be valued differently as taste and cataloguing changed. Its compressed, powerful early style, which now makes it central to an account of Rubens's return from Italy, was not always the quality a collector most wanted.
The same National Gallery research cites a 1706 list of work for the sculptor Giovanni Giuliani, including carved cartouches for the Massacre and other Liechtenstein paintings. Its authors caution that the document establishes cartouches, not the making of each complete frame. That distinction is small but useful: the Toronto painting had a designed role in a princely display, yet the surviving list does not tell us exactly how every frame was built. Provenance is more than a line of owners; it includes the names, neighbouring pictures and physical presentation through which an object was seen.
The painting returned temporarily to Antwerp for a Rubens House display from September 2018 to March 2019[5]. The loan allowed viewers to encounter a work made in Rubens's early Antwerp period in the setting of his former home and studio. It also preceded the AGO's Early Rubens exhibition. The journey is part of the modern reception of the work, while the present collection identity remains the Thomson Collection in Toronto.
Which Massacre of the Innocents is this?
Rubens later returned to the theme in the painting now in Munich. The Alte Pinakothek's panel is dated around 1638 and measures 198.5 × 302.2 centimetres. Its action extends through many groups across a broad civic setting. In Toronto, the figures are more tightly compressed, and the foreground struggle dominates. The works should be compared as two separate treatments rather than presented as photographs of one object or as stages of one documented commission.
The similar English titles can hide that distinction. The institutional identifiers are clearer: Toronto 2014/1581 and Munich 572. A claim about the Toronto panel's early date or Thomson Collection history does not belong to the Munich panel. Nor should Munich's oak support, width or Electoral Gallery acquisition be copied onto Toronto's record.
Looking from one painting to the other shows Rubens changing the scale of the subject. This panel concentrates force where bodies collide directly in front of us. The later work sends the eye among many groups and across an urban scene. Both concern the same order and the same human cost, but the experience of following each painting is different.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
The Art Gallery of Ontario dates it about 1610, soon after Rubens's return to Antwerp from Italy.
The AGO records oil on panel, measuring 142 × 183 × 1.9 centimetres including the panel's thickness.
No. The Toronto painting is the earlier, smaller panel, object 2014/1581. Munich holds a separate, much wider panel dated around 1638, inventory 572.
It depicts the biblical massacre ordered by Herod. The AGO connects its force to the memory of religious war in Antwerp, but that is a curatorial reading of context, not proof that Rubens portrayed a named local event.
It belongs to the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. The AGO's current object record lists it as object 2014/1581.
Discussion
Look closely at the compressed movement among the figures in the Toronto panel.
Share an observation about the painting or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
How do the foreground gestures convey both fear and resistance?
What does the narrow pictorial space make difficult to see at first?
How does this early panel differ from Rubens's later Munich version?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- Art Gallery of Ontario, The Massacre of the Innocents , object record. View source
- Art Gallery of Ontario, Early Rubens exhibition and curatorial account. View source
- New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Matthew 2:16–18. View source
- Bavarian State Painting Collections, the separate Munich Massacre of the Innocents. View source
- Rubens House, 2018 Antwerp loan and attribution history. View source
- AGO, Early Rubens exhibition announcement and interpretation. View source
- National Gallery, 2025 catalogue research on the Liechtenstein display, reattribution and cartouches of the Toronto Massacre. View source
