Peter Paul Ruben's Massacre Of The Innocents
This paper is a formal analysis, treating Peter Paul Rubens’ 1612 masterpiece, Massacre of the Innocents. The oil painting stands at approximately 150 x 200 cm, a size offering the viewer a window-like gaze into a historical scene of twisted, bloody carnage. Formally, there is much cohesion with the overall disastrous theme of human chaos and disorder. On a compositional whole, the anguish and psychological suffering compliments scattered lighting, vivid color, and clustered space. The painting is a good example of how the combination of form and narrative yield a rich transmission of historical, emotional and formal data to the viewer, who does not even need to be literate. A historical renaissance era painting typically is a story that tells
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In applying visual literacy, connections can be made to help understand what the artist wanted to show us. For example, the peculiar lighting on the small child could be the artist’s way of making this helpless cherub the “star” or protagonist, where a viewer may be inclined to enter the painting through the experience of the unassuming, genderless victim. The child is looking away, which also invites the viewer to more easily be this helpless angelic being. A more sensitive viewer may even feel inescapable pangs of responsibility, confronted with its physicality. It may be noted that this painting’s forms bear resemblance to a stage play. This marriage of the psychological and emotional to the spatial-physical world can be seen as Renaissance paintings great triumphs, as they grew in sophistication at depicting a 3D space, with the development of geometrical perspective. In processing a dramatic scene, one can notice in works, such as these oil paintings, a growing resemblance to strategic compositional tactics employed in theatre. Space, lighting, color can all be used to treat a settings feeling and pull a spectator in. In this group of painted 2D brushstrokes masquerading as 3D people, all characters are corralled to what a director calls “center stage front”: the place for drama, and giving the crowd a sense claustrophobia. Anxiety and intimacy, here are amplified, peaking in unison, as the lights are strong, the colors saturated. The people are in the throes of life, or death, or committing genocide. Massacre of the Innocents is in many ways an overwhelming spectacle, psychologically and
In applying visual literacy, connections can be made to help understand what the artist wanted to show us. For example, the peculiar lighting on the small child could be the artist’s way of making this helpless cherub the “star” or protagonist, where a viewer may be inclined to enter the painting through the experience of the unassuming, genderless victim. The child is looking away, which also invites the viewer to more easily be this helpless angelic being. A more sensitive viewer may even feel inescapable pangs of responsibility, confronted with its physicality. It may be noted that this painting’s forms bear resemblance to a stage play. This marriage of the psychological and emotional to the spatial-physical world can be seen as Renaissance paintings great triumphs, as they grew in sophistication at depicting a 3D space, with the development of geometrical perspective. In processing a dramatic scene, one can notice in works, such as these oil paintings, a growing resemblance to strategic compositional tactics employed in theatre. Space, lighting, color can all be used to treat a settings feeling and pull a spectator in. In this group of painted 2D brushstrokes masquerading as 3D people, all characters are corralled to what a director calls “center stage front”: the place for drama, and giving the crowd a sense claustrophobia. Anxiety and intimacy, here are amplified, peaking in unison, as the lights are strong, the colors saturated. The people are in the throes of life, or death, or committing genocide. Massacre of the Innocents is in many ways an overwhelming spectacle, psychologically and