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The Virgin and Child Surrounded by the Holy Innocents
c. 1618 · Huile sur toile (oil on canvas) · Musée du Louvre, Paris — Département des Peintures
Sizes
image 17.5×24 in on a 18×24 in sheet
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All editionsAbout this painting
A palm branch rises at the top of the sky, lifted by a child, and all around Our Lady the air is thick with small bodies, none of them winged. The Louvre reads the wingless infants as the Holy Innocents, the boys of Bethlehem killed on Herod's order, not angels; the popular title, the Virgin with Angels, goes back to a mistaken engraving. Palms are the martyrs' mark. The Christ Child clings at her neck, and above her head a child holds a ring of flowers. Rubens painted it around 1618, the Louvre says, the grouping owing to Titian and Pordenone; it is his only known treatment of the subject. Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage, preached: "The children die for Christ, though they do not know it." Herod was hunting one Child, and Rubens has set Him in the middle of them.
Sources: Musée du Louvre, INV 1763 / MR 995. · Palm as the martyrs' attribute, theological basis for reading the infants as martyr-figures · Quodvultdeus of Carthage, 'Sermo 2 de Symbolo' (PL 40, 655). · Office of Readings, Holy Innocents, 28 December. · Crossroads Initiative, 'Holy Innocents, Children yet Martyrs — Quodvultdeus'. · Matthew 2:16, Douay-Rheims (Challoner).
Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Matthew 2:16 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner)