Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents: Bruegel’s Massacres of the Innocents in Their Sixteenth‐century Political Contexts

Abstract

This article approaches the famous Bruegel painting by establishing possible precursors for the politicization of the Massacre of the Innocents in European drama and art. With the wars, the theme moves, suddenly popular, from Italy to the north. I argue that there are, in fact, two distinct compositions of the subject by Bruegel the Elder, the other being much less well known but probably derived from him (both were later much copied), which I place with new evidence in the context of Spanish repression, and other politicized versions of the theme by other Flemish artists. By indicating the severity of the repression well before the arrival of Alva in 1567, I show that arguments in favour of the one autograph version (Hampton Court) having a contemporary application do not depend on a later dating, and that any resemblance of the commander of the massacre to the Duke of Alva in the Vienna version and other copies, is due to their having been done a ‘safer’ generation later. Other relevant political works by Bruegel are adduced, notably the Census and Preaching of St John. A consciousness of Spanish tyranny and slaughter is carried into the later part of the century, via anti‐Spanish cartoons, paintings of (non‐biblical) killing and plundering and other Massacres of the Innocents, notably and climactically those by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, which must have been affected by his childhood experience of the Siege of Haarlem in 1573.