Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem

Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem, painted around 1450 and now in the Museum of San Marco, is one of the more unusual subjects in Fra Angelico's Passion and infancy cycle. The killing of the infant boys ordered by Herod—a scene of violence and maternal grief—posed obvious compositional and emotional challenges for a painter whose instinct was toward serenity and spiritual transcendence. Yet Fra Angelico was not afraid of grief: his Lamentation scenes and Crucifixions engage sorrow directly. The Massacre belongs to the sequence of scenes prefiguring Christ's Passion through the persecution and martyrdom that surrounded his birth.

The violence of the subject requires depicting struggling and grief-stricken figures—poses that demand more dynamic drawing than Fra Angelico's typically serene compositions. His handling is likely more restrained than later Baroque treatments of the subject, with grief expressed through posture and facial expression rather than graphic depiction of injury.