INNOCENTI, THE MASSACRE OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS. —
I. SACRED SCRIPTURE
After the flight into Egypt, Mt. 2:16-18 describes the vengeance of Herod the Great, which fulfilled a prophecy of Jer. 31:15. “Herod, seeing himself deceived by the Magi,” who, obedient to the angel’s voice, had returned to their own country by another way, “was exceedingly angry” at the mockery he had suffered and at the fear of disturbances in favor of the new king of the Jews, “and sent to kill all the children who were in Bethlehem, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had carefully inquired from the Magi” (Mt. 2:16). Indeed, he had “diligently inquired of them the time of the star’s appearing” (ibid., 2:7). From his careful investigations, Herod concluded that the Child had not yet passed two years of age. It seems, however, that he supposed the Child to be at least one year old, otherwise it is not clear why, cruel as he was, he extended the massacre to all children under two years of age (v. Testamento).The exact number of children massacred cannot be determined with precision. The symbolic number of 144,000 given in Apoc. 14:1, which refers to the army of Christian ascetics, is evidently of no value in this regard. However, this passage, which is read in the Ambrosian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ethiopian liturgies on the feast of the Holy Innocents, has led some ancient writers and a few modern preachers to exaggerate the number of the Innocents to that figure.
More reliable are calculations based on demographic statistics. Even here, however, the estimates vary considerably, both because the number of inhabitants of Bethlehem and its surroundings at the time of Christ is unknown and because the birth and infant mortality rates are uncertain.
U. Holzmeister maintains that Bethlehem then had about 3,000 inhabitants, and that about 120 children were born there each year (40 per thousand, half of whom were male). Assuming that of the 120 males born in two years, a third died, the survivors would have been 80. Extending the calculations to the surrounding area and allowing for a mortality of two-fifths of the children born in a two-year period, he concludes that the number of victims of Herod’s massacre was between 65 and 80. Other commentators, who reduce the population of Bethlehem to about a thousand, the birth rate to 30 per thousand, and the mortality to half of the children born, give much lower figures. Some limit the number to 10-12 killed (A. Bisping, P. Schegg), others to 12-15 (P. Schanz, J. Knabenbauer), while many favor about twenty (Pöltzl-Innitzer, A. E. Mader, M.-J. Lagrange, M. Sales, H. Simón-G. Dorado, V. HERMON). G. Ricciotti estimates between 20 and 25; others between 20 and 40 (A. Durand, P. Dausch, Th. Zahn, etc.).
The First Gospel continues: “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying: A voice was heard in Rama, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Mt. 2:17-18; cf. Jer. 31:15). In the literal, transferred sense, using the rhetorical figure called prosopopoeia, Jeremiah imagined Rachel (v.), one of the great mothers of Israel, buried near Bethlehem, rising from the tomb to weep for her children, the Jews, who at the time of the fall of Jerusalem were being deported from Rama into Babylonian exile. St. Matthew saw in Rachel’s weeping a typical sense (or at least a figure) of the weeping of the women of Bethlehem on the occasion of the massacre of the Holy Innocents.
The historicity of this episode is questioned by D. Strauss and many non-Catholics on the grounds that Flavius Josephus (v.) does not mention II. But Flavius Josephus cites many other episodes of Herod’s cruelty. He could well have passed over in silence the massacre of a few children of Bethlehem, especially since, by principle, he sought to avoid anything concerning Jesus and Christianity.
Pietro de Ambroggi
II. ARCHAEOLOGY
The representation of the massacre of the Holy Innocents is rare in early Christian art. In the field of low-relief sculpture, the scene is found on the lid of a sarcophagus in the crypt of St-Maximin.
by Egbert (Künstle, V. BIBLICA., I, p. 374) and in other codices of the same period. In the 11th century, the scene becomes notably widespread in Italian art. It appears in the paintings of S. Urbano alla Caffarella, in those of S. Angelo in Formis, near Capua, and in those of Ferentillo, and, still during the Romanesque period, in the ivory antependium of the cathedral of Salerno. But toward the end of the 12th century, Bonanno Pisano gives the narrative in the bronze door called that of S. Ranieri in the cathedral of Pisa a notable decorative liveliness with slender, almost vegetal rhythms, which partly reflect Byzantine and Teutonic influences. The subsequent evolution of the composition, animated by a Gothic spirit, is documented by the relief, with about sixty figures and strong dramatic motifs, which adorns the pulpit of the cathedral of Siena, carved around 1268 by Nicola Pisano and his collaborators. And, at the beginning of the 14th century, two great painters, of quite different temperaments, fix in the iconography of the massacre of the Innocents figurative schemes of undeniable prestige: Duccio di Buoninsegna in the famous Maestà (Museum of the Opera del Duomo, in Siena), and the Florentine Giotto in the mural cycle of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Still in that century, worthy of mention are the fine relief on the third pillar of the façade of the Duomo in Orvieto, by a collaborator of Lorenzo Maitani, and the fresco by Spinello Aretino in S. Maria Maggiore, in Florence. From the early 15th century onward, it seems that sculptors abandoned the representation of this episode, while it continued to interest colorists, narrators par excellence, such as Andrea di Bartolo, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Matteo di Giovanni, Andrea di Niccolò; and also Antonio da Viterbo, called il Pastura; superior to all of these is the Ferrarese Ercole de’ Roberti, who in the Madonna in trono in the Pinacoteca di Brera (1480) treats the episode in the form of a faux bas-relief. A few years later, Ghirlandaio composes the scene with agitated, though rhetorical, forms in the Tornabuoni Chapel of S. Maria Novella, in Florence. Reaching its fullest flowering, Renaissance classicism employs this subject more than anything else to display graceful anatomies. Thus one sees the Bolognese engraver Marcantonio Raimondi compose, on a design by Raphael, a harmonious yet academic theatrical scene, with the assassins completely nude and the children sturdy, almost like marble.
In all these representations the scene follows well-defined compositional rules, despite the diversity of technique and execution in the details. Characteristic is the executioner’s gesture, who, having seized the small victim by a leg, swings it through the air and then hurls it to the ground. A seated figure presides over the execution, almost certainly Herod; the mothers watch in despair. More complex, but based on the same schema, is the depiction in the Rabbūl Evangelary and in the Codex purpureus of Munich. Noble and inspired is the scene from the 5th-century mosaic decoration on the triumphal arch of the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, where the mothers of Bethlehem with their infants in their arms appear before Herod’s tribunal; the group is artistically notable for its perspectival refinement. Special mention should be made of a fresco in the underground church of Deir Abū H̱annīs, near ancient Antinoöpolis (Middle Egypt), which depicts various moments of the massacre and related episodes. The dating of the church’s paintings, all of the same style and period, ranges from the 5th to the 6th century.
III. ART
In the 10th century the representation of the Holy Innocents appears as an episode of cruelty in the CodexINNOCENTI – INNOCENZO I
of the 16th-century Farnese Hours, while in the same century it is rendered in radiant hues: thus by Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo in the scene in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, and by Ludovico Mazzolino in the small panels of the Uffizi, the Museum of The Hague, and above all in the fanciful composition in the Doria Gallery in Rome, where the luminous, undulating figures have an Oriental fairy-tale quality. In the Venetian school of the 16th century one recalls the works of the Veronese Giovanni Francesco Caroto (Museum of Bergamo and Uffizi Gallery), Bonifazio dei Pitati (Accademia of Venice), and Paolo Farinati (in the church of S. Maria in Organo, Verona); yet it was the brilliant Tintoretto who infused a novel, tempestuous spirit into the traditional carnage with his monumental canvas in the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. During the Baroque period the subject appears rarely, though Guido Reni in his celebrated painting in the Pinacoteca of Bologna achieved sincere eloquence in the foreground figure of the kneeling mother, her eyes and lips pleading for divine mercy. A broader conception and greater stylistic freedom were later achieved by another Bolognese, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, called Lo Spagnolo, in his canvas in the Uffizi Gallery, where the most imaginative element is the flight of the little angels through the murky air, namely the souls of the infant martyrs ascending to Heaven.
— See pls. I-II.