Download Baldwin Rubens Massacre of the Innocents

Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
[email protected]
www.socialhistoryofart.com
(This essay was written in 2006.)
Prelude: Capital Punishment as a Public Theater of Law, Order, and Justice
Until the eighteenth-century, most capital punishment was carried out in public as a stern arena
of law and order meant to instill fear, awe, and reverence for state authority. Physical brutality
was an important element in capital punishment as seen in the Roman empire which made torture
central to judicial procedures (except for aristocrats) and to many forms of capital punishment. It
was the Romans who often staged executions in the Roman arena as popular entertainments
made more appealing through the use of theatrical tortures such as death by wild animals, fire,
boiling liquids, amputation, skinning, disemboweling, flogging with lead-tipped whips, and so
forth. Located in the arena, capital punishment provided a judicial, politically-charged variation
on the well-established Roman institution of gladiator combat. The Romans also institutionalized
other forms of public torture death, most famously the crucifixion. It is estimated that some
10,000 criminals were crucified the year Christ was executed. Although torture disappeared in
the Christian Middle Ages, it came back in the twelfth century when Roman church authorities
faced the crisis of widespread heresy in Southern France. It was quickly adopted by secular
courts as well. From 1200 until 1700, torture and public torture executions were the rule in
Europe.
From Roman Capital Punishment to Christian Martyrdom
From the ancient Romans to the eighteenth century, the use of capital punishment as a public
arena of justice suffered from one potential weakness which the early Christians exploited in the
idea of martyrdom. When the criminal executed had widespread support in the community,
public execution risked undermining state authority, not reinforcing it. This was particularly
problematic when the criminals executed were disloyal members of a new, rapidly spreading
religion – Christianity – who had committed no crime save the refusal to worship Roman state
gods and who used their own executions to display familiar Roman virtues such a fortitude and
Stoic tranquility amidst horrific suffering and death. By going peacefully to their deaths,
Christians transformed the exemplary public spectacle of their own proper punishment for
treasonous disloyalty into a powerful theater of Christian Stoic endurance, courage, fortitude,
and piety. Roman justice was turned upside down and became Christian martyrdom.
Until the Reformation (1518-), most martyrdom was confined to the Early Christian period
which ended in 313 AD when the Roman emperor, Constantine, proclaimed Christianity the new
state religion of the Roman empire. Even before Christianity emerged from persecution to
imperial power, writers and artists used the early martyrs as powerful examples mobilizing
Christian communities, spread Christian doctrine, and representing pagan values as barbaric.
Martyrdom as Late Medieval Piety and Sacred Art
In the later Middle Ages, writers continued to extol the example of the early martyrs and looked
back nostalgically on this early period as a heroic age. Like the saint, the martyr was another
lofty example to emulate. Indeed, many of the early Christian saints were martyrs, including
Peter, Paul, Matthew, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, and Sebastian. I don’t yet have the
background to account fully for the new popularity of martyrdom as a theme in late medieval
popular piety and art. One component was the rise of affective piety and Passion piety in the
fourteenth century. The same period which suddenly focused on Christ’s human suffering, and
which promoted penitential piety and “holy suffering” and which exploited the emotional power
of visceral images also took a new interest in the early Christian martyrs. The westward
expansion of the Ottoman Turkish empire after 1375 may have also played a small role in the
resurgence of martyrdom as a subject in Christian culture but probably not until the later
fifteenth century when Turkish motifs began to appear in scenes of early Christian martyrdom.
The Politics of Martyrdom in an Age of Reformation
With the rise of the Reformation, the theme of martyrdom was suddenly reborn as a pressing
contemporary reality and a real possibility for those voicing the wrong ideas in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Catholics tried to suppress the latest heresy with the familiar remedy of public
executions. The English Chancellor, Thomas More presided over the arrest, torture, and
execution of six leading Protestants in England. More even published a treatise defending torture
and state violence as necessary measures against the grave social and political threat of a
perceived Protestant rioting, mob violence, and warfare. More distinguished between state
violence, which resembled the righteous wrath of God and which restored order and virtue, and
popular violence from below which threatened all civilization. More fell victim to his own logic
when Henry VIII seized control of the Catholic church in England and transformed it into the
Protestant Church of England headed by the king. Catholics were now disobedient, including
Thomas More who was quickly beheaded, and just as quickly canonized by the Catholic church
as a martyred saint. As head of the Anglican Church, Henry VIII seized the vast lands owned by
abbeys, convents, and monasteries while making even the smallest parish church into a
mouthpiece for royal authority, preached through the local minister. When a Catholic queen,
Mary I, returned to the throne for five years (1553-8), hundreds of English Protestants were
arrested, tortured, and put to death in public executions aimed at stemming what had become a
widespread heresy taken up by many powerful nobles and prosperous burghers. Mary’s Catholic
regime was followed by fifty years under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth who made the Catholic
mass high treason, punishable by death, and had some hundred Catholics arrested, tortured, and
executed. Elsewhere in Europe, the spread of the Reformation into the high nobility and royalty
and into urban burgher elites set the conditions for widespread violence and, at times, civil war
(as in France).
By printing illustrated books of Catholic and Protestant martyrdom, each side used the timehonored Christian theme of martyrdom as a powerful weapon to demonize the other. In these
religious cultural wars, Catholics had the advantage of church art which took up the theme of the
early Christian martyrs with a new zeal and bloody naturalism. In the 1580s, the circular walls of
the Roman church of S. Stefano Rotondo were painted with graphic frescoes surveying all the
important early Christian martyrs, starting with the Massacre of the Innocents and showing the
crucified Christ as the King of the Martyrs. An illustrated book soon followed, reproducing these
frescoes and adding theological commentary. Although seventeenth-century Catholic scenes of
martyrdom focused on the early Christian martyrs, not contemporary victims, all such paintings
and sculptures addressed the new contemporary reality of martyrdom.
Martyrdom as Ideology in the Age of Reformation
With siding of powerful nobles and monarchs with the Protestant cause, the conditions were set
to transform political struggle and warfare into sectarian violence and to heat up secular conflicts
with the absolutism, self-righteousness, and extremism of religious hatred. It was one thing for
one region in Europe to represent a traditional regional enemy as corrupt, effeminate, decadent,
as was the case with England and France. It was quite another for Protestants and Catholics to
represent each other as monstrous agents of Satan doomed to hell. The combination of political
and religious hostility proved deadly. And nothing was more calculated to stir up religious hatred
and feed the flames of religious violence than martyrdom. By demonizing the enemy as a
bloodthirsty, savage, ungodly monster, martyrdom swept all nuance, discussion, legitimate
issues, and reason out the door and left a stark and frighteningly simple universe of moral
absolutes. Martyrdom divided the world into black and white, into innocent victims and evil
persecutors (in the case of Protestants and Catholics) or innocent victims and uncivilized beasts
(in the case of non-Christian enemies such as Turks and peoples from the Far East). Martyrdom
silenced all discussion, all reasonable acknowledgements of differences, all negotiation, all
compromise and tolerance. Indeed, for all its rhetoric of Christian innocence and the Christ-like
acceptance of an unjust death, the new theme of martyrdom encouraged more religious violence
as retribution against mortal enemies whose dehumanization made them more easily butchered.
Martyrdom and Gender
Although long seen in Christian theology as the first martyrdom, the Massacre of the Innocents
emerged as an important subject only in the fourteenth century as the same moment when the
Madonna and Child began to circulate as a more popular devotional image. Although all of those
butchered children had fathers, writers and artists exploited traditional gender values by focusing
largely or exclusively on the lamenting mothers. By removing fathers from the story and
representing women as passive victims, writers and artists constructed a traditional world of male
action and female passivity, male politics and female domesticity, fertility, and childcare, male
warfare and female peace, male severity and female emotion, especially love, compassion, and
pity. (Interestingly, the Pieta also emerged at this time as a subject of “feminine” pity.) While
these gender roles were familiar, the Massacre of the Innocents brought them into sharper focus
by creating a subject devoted exclusively to male violence against women and children. Without
minimizing the new importance of the child in late medieval piety, these paintings were in many
ways more focused visually on the dramatically lamenting mothers, just as the newly popular
themes of the Madonna and Child and Pieta were more about the Virgin Mary. We can draw
closer parallels to the growing importance of the Lamentation from the early fourteenth century
(Giotto) to the fifteenth (Donatello, Nicolo del’Arca) to the sixteenth (Correggio, Titian,
Veronese) to the seventeenth (Carracci, Van Dyck) allowed artists to develop pictorial and
emotional variations on the gendered theme of female lament.
A few artists such as Bruegel, and later, Rubens introduced greater complexity into the gender
dynamic of the Massacre by including husbands and burgher family values (Bruegel) and by
showing the women fighting back (Bruegel, Rubens), thereby making them more complex and
powerful as human beings.
Massacre of the Innocents as Anti-War Protest?
The proliferation of violence across the surface of Rubens’ large oil painting and the centrality of
his lamenting women in that composition offers a close parallel in Christian terms to the
mythological imagery which Rubens used almost twenty years later in his Horrors of War, a
powerful anti-war painting made in the late 1630s. This period saw the beginning of the Thirty
Years War (1618-48) which engulfed most of Europe in a cataclysmic and devastating violence
not seen again until the Napoleonic period. The looming importance of the cruel ruler, Herod, in
Rubens’s Massacre may also play on the cruelty of contemporary rulers. Conversely, the
gendered rhetoric of the Massacre of the Innocents strongly informed Rubens’s Horrors of War
where the same gender roles appear. Mars inflicts violence on an allegorical population which is
largely female whose allegorical meaning is naturalized through the strong emotional realities
and the children they protect. Continuing this gender theme, Rubens introduced two lamenting or
resisting women at the left, Venus and Europa, each with their own children. While the Thirty
Years War had only just started when Rubens painted the Massacre of the Innocents (1621),
warfare was a problem for Europe throughout Rubens’ life and may be a theme addressed
indirectly in this Biblical painting.
Passion and Massacre as Modern Artistry and Rhetoric
Rubens also made his soldiers more passion-driven and sordid, rejecting the overly heroic,
classical nudity used for Herod’s soldiers by Raphael in his influential Massacre of the
Innocents, known through an engraving. As with Renaissance and Baroque Lamentations,
Ascensions, battle scenes, and other emotionally dramatic subjects, the Massacre of the
Innocents was, in part, a self-conscious display of artistic ability in the handling of emotionally
dramatic figures. This was already part of the new naturalism of the late Middle Ages as seen in
Giotto’s Lamentation where each of the many angels offered a variation on grief and sorrow. The
display of the rhetorical or emotionally expressive body reached a new level of self-conscious
artistry in the late fifteenth century as seen in Niccolo del Arca’s Lamentation. It was even more
important with the rise of art theory from Leonardo on as a key element in History Painting
which compared itself to the classical rhetoric which used emotionally charged language and
speaking gestures to rouse the audience. By the seventeenth century, all discussions of History
Painting praised the artistic handling of the “Passions of the Soul” and artists competed to
surpass each other in this particular arena. This painting of the Passions was particularly clear in
the highly contrived images of the Massacre of the Innocents developed by Reni and Poussin and
in contemporary poems praising Reni’s artful horror.