Massacre of the Holy Innocents

INNOCENTS, MASSACRE OF THE HOLY. - 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 mocked by the Magi," who, obedient to the voice of the angel, had returned to their countries by another way, "was greatly enraged" at the trick played on him and out of fear of agitation in favor of the new king of the Jews, and he sent to slaughter all the male children who were in Bethlehem, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had carefully ascertained from the Magi" (Mt. 2:16). He had in fact "inquired diligently of them about the time of the appearance of the star" (ibid. 2:7). From his diligent inquiries Herod had concluded that the Child had not yet passed the age of two. Apparently, however, he supposed that He had reached at least the age of one, otherwise it is not clear why, cruel as he was, he would have extended the slaughter to all children under two years of age (v. BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY, New Testament).

The number of children massacred cannot be established with precision. The symbolic number of 144,000 given in Rev. 14:1, which alludes to the army of Christian ascetics, evidently has no value in this regard. Nevertheless this passage, which is read in the Ambrosian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ethiopian liturgies on the feast of the Holy I., has led some ancient writers and a few belated modern preachers to exaggerate the number of the I. up to that figure.

More well-founded are the calculations based on demographic statistics. Here too, however, the variations are considerable, both because the number of inhabitants of Bethlehem and its surroundings at the time of Christ is unknown, and because the birth rate and infant mortality rate are unknown.

U. Holzmeister maintains that Bethlehem then had about 3,000 inhabitants, that about 120 children were born there each year (40 per thousand, of whom half were male). Supposing that of the 120 males born in two years one third died, the survivors would have been 80. Extending the calculations to the surrounding area and also allowing a mortality of 2/5 of those born in a two-year period, he concludes that the number of Herod's victims was between 65 and 80. Other commentators, who reduce the inhabitants of Bethlehem to about a thousand, the birth rate to 30 per thousand, and mortality to half of those born, give much lower figures. Some limit themselves to 10-12 killed (A. Bisping, P. Schegg), others to 12-15 (P. Schanz, J. Knabenbauer), many settle on about twenty (Pöltzl-Innitzer, A. E. Mader, M.-J. Lagrange, M. Sales, H. Simón-G. Dorado, V. Ermoni). G. Ricciotti thinks between 20 and 25; others between 20 and 40 (A. Durand, P. Dausch, Th. Zahn, etc.).

The first Gospel continues: "Then was fulfilled the word of the prophet Jeremiah which says: A voice was heard in Rama, weeping and great lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, because they are no more" (Mt. 2:17-18; cf. Jer. 31:15). In the literal transferred sense, using the rhetorical figure called prosopopoeia, Jeremiah imagined that Rachel (v.), one of the great mothers of the Israelites, buried near Bethlehem, rose from the tomb to weep for her children, the Hebrews, who at the time of the fall of Jerusalem were being deported from Rama into the Babylonian exile. St. Matthew discerned in that weeping of Rachel 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 I.

The historicity of this episode is called into question by D. Strauss and by several non-Catholics on the ground that Flavius Josephus (v.) does not speak of it. 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, all the more so since, as a matter of principle, he sought to avoid everything that concerned Jesus and Christianity.

Pietro de Ambroggi

II. ARCHAEOLOGY

The representation of the massacre of the Innocents is rare in early Christian art. In the field of sculpture in low relief the scene is found on the lid of a sarcophagus in the crypt of St-Maximin in Provence and on a fragment of a similar lid near Aix-en-Provence. The two examples are probably from the same period (4th-5th centuries) and the same school. Among the ivories, two covers of Evangeliaries in the cathedral of Milan are to be remembered, an example from the 5th century in the National Museum of Paris and in the South Kensington Museum of London.

In all these representations the scene follows well-determined compositional rules, despite the diversity of technique and of rendering of details. Characteristic is the gesture of the executioner, who, having seized the small victim by one leg, swings it in the air and then dashes it to the ground. A figure enthroned, almost certainly Herod, is present at the execution; the mothers look on in despair. More complex, but based on the same schemes, is the figuration in the Evangeliary of Rabbula and in the Purple Codex of Munich. Noble and inspired is the scene forming part of the 5th-century mosaic decoration in the triumphal arch of the basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, a scene in which the mothers of Bethlehem with their children in their arms appear before the tribunal of Herod; the group is artistically remarkable for its pursuit of perspective. A particular mention is due to a fresco of the underground church of Deir Abu Hennis, near ancient Antinoe (Middle Egypt), which shows various moments of the massacre and the episodes relating to it. The dating of the paintings of the church, all of the same style and the same period, oscillates from the 5th to the 6th century.

Luigi Maria Catteruccia

III. ART

In the 10th century the massacre of the Innocents appears as a representation of savage episodes of cruelty in the Codex of Egbert (Künste, v. bibl., I, p. 374) and in other codices of the same age. In the 11th century the scene acquires notable diffusion in Italian art. It is seen in the paintings of S. Urbano alla Caffarella, in those of S. Angelo in Formis, near Capua, and in the others of Ferentillo, and, still during the Romanesque age, in the ivory antependium of the cathedral of Salerno. But toward the end of the 12th century, Bonanno Pisano confers on the narrative in the bronze door known as that of St. Ranieri in the cathedral of Pisa a notable decorative liveliness with slender, almost vegetable rhythms, which are partly affected by Byzantine and Teutonic influences. The subsequent evolution of the composition, animated by a Gothic spirit, is documented by the relief, with about sixty figures, with strong dramatic motifs, that 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 very different temperament, fix for the iconography of the massacre of the Innocents figurative schemes of undeniable prestige: Duccio di Boninsegna in the famous Maestà (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, in Siena), and the Florentine Giotto in the wall cycle of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Still in that century, worthy of mention are the fine relief on the third pier of the facade of the Cathedral, in Orvieto, due to a collaborator of Lorenzo Maitani, and the fresco by Spinello Aretino in S. Maria Maggiore, in Florence. From the beginning of the 15th century onward, it seems that sculptors abandon the representation of this episode, while it continues to interest the Sienese colorists, narrators par excellence, such as Andrea di Bartolo, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Matteo di Giovanni, Andrea di Niccolò; and also Antonio da Viterbo, known as il Pastura; superior to all of these, the Ferrarese Ercole de' Roberti who in the Madonna in throne of the Pinacoteca of Brera (1480) treats the episode in the form of a feigned bas-relief. A few years later Ghirlandaio composes the scene with agitated but rhetorical forms, in the choir of S. Maria Novella, in Florence. Having reached its maximum luxuriance, the classicizing Renaissance makes use of this subject more than anything else to display comely anatomies. Thus one sees the Bolognese engraver Marcantonio Raimondi compose, after a design by Raphael, a harmonious yet academic theatrical action, with the assassins completely naked and the children massive, almost of marble. Some Ferrarese of the 16th century expresses himself instead by displaying brilliant tonalities: thus Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo in the scene of the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, and Ludovico Mazzolino in the small pictures of the Uffizi, of the Museum of The Hague and above all in the bizarre composition of the Doria Gallery, in Rome, where the glossy and rounded figures have a flavor of oriental fable. In the Venetian school of the 16th century are remembered the works of the Veronese Giovanni Francesco Caroto (Museum of Bergamo and Gallery of the Uffizi), Bonifazio dei Pitati (Accademia of Venice), and Paolo Farinati (choir of S. Maria in Organo, in Verona); but it was to be the ingenious Tintoretto who infused an unprecedented tempestuous breath into the traditional carnage with the gigantic canvas of the Scuola di S. Rocco, in Venice. During the Baroque period the composition appears rarely, yet Guido Reni in the decorous painting of the Pinacoteca of Bologna achieved sincere eloquence in the figure, in the foreground, of the kneeling mother, with eyes and lips imploring divine grace. And a greater breadth of conception and freedom of stylistic movement was attained, later, by the other Bolognese Giuseppe Maria Crespi, known as lo Spagnolo, with the canvas of the Gallery of the Uffizi, where the most fanciful element is constituted by the flight of the little angels up through the dark air, that is, the souls of the small martyrs, ascending to Heaven. - See pls. I-II.

Alberto Neppi