As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16–18), Herod the Great, King of Judea, ordered the slaughter of boys under the age of two in and near the town of Bethlehem. Herod’s larger aim was to kill the infant Jesus, who had been heralded as King of the Jews. In this painting Navez consigned those acts of violence to the background and filled the foreground with an interwoven cluster of life-size figures, compressed into shallow relief to heighten the viewer’s identification with their vulnerability. This scene’s "frightening realism" struck critics when the canvas was first exhibited in 1824, in Amsterdam and then in Brussels.
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