The Massacre of the Innocents

This Massacre of the Innocents at the Metropolitan Museum depicts King Herod's slaughter of infant boys in Bethlehem—ordered when the Magi reported a newborn King of the Jews—as both historical event and theological foreshadowing of the Holy Innocents as proto-martyrs. The subject's graphic violence—soldiers tearing infants from mothers' arms—was rendered with unusual directness in medieval and early Renaissance painting, the mothers' grief providing emotional focal points amid the chaos. Sano di Pietro brings characteristic Sienese formal elegance to subject matter that might elsewhere generate Expressionistic intensity, the horror present but contained within the refined visual tradition of his training.

The violent narrative is organized with Sano di Pietro's characteristic compositional clarity, the horror of the subject conveyed through gesture and expression while the Sienese style maintains its inherent decorative refinement.