The Massacre of the Innocents

Herod stands on a balcony and gives the order with outstretched arm. Below, soldiers tear the children from their mothers. The dead already lie in a heap at the bottom of the picture.

The fresco belongs to the cycle Giotto painted around 1305 in the chapel of Enrico Scrovegni in Padua. Giotto gives the mothers faces distorted by weeping, something painting had hardly shown before him. At the left edge two men turn away and look at the ground.