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A block of horsemen waits under a hedge of upright lances. One rider at the center wears black armor. Viewers have wanted him to be the Duke of Alba for four centuries, and the painting never says so.

Bruegel painted the Massacre of the Innocents around 1566 and set it in a Brabant village under snow. Armored horsemen block the square. Soldiers work from house to house while families beg at the stirrups. The subject was nominally scripture, Herod's soldiers hunting the newborn of Bethlehem, but nobody in the Low Countries needed the reference explained. Spanish and imperial troops were the daily weather of the Netherlands on the eve of the revolt. Bruegel put the killing squad in the armor of his own century and gave the troop at the center a commander in black. Viewers then and since have read that officer as the Duke of Alba. His Council of Troubles would shortly be sentencing Netherlanders to death fast enough to earn it the name Council of Blood. The painting told the truth so plainly that it was eventually corrected. By about 1600 the panel belonged to the emperor Rudolf II in Prague. He collected wonders and had no appetite for this one, so he ordered the children painted out. Under careful overpaint, each murdered infant became something a soldier might plausibly loot: a goose, a swaddled bundle of bread, a calf, jugs, a boar. A woman pleading for her baby now pleads for a jar. The mothers' grief was left exactly as painted, redirected at poultry. The most dangerous picture in the Habsburg collection turned into a scene of soldiers looting a village, and hung comfortably for centuries. The panel in the Royal Collection is Bruegel's original, still wearing Rudolf's edits. Charles II bought it at Breda in 1660, while he was still in exile. Imaging shows the children under the animals, and copies made by Bruegel's son before the censorship keep the scene as it was. The two versions now function as a controlled experiment in what a painting is for. One shows a massacre; the other shows a cover-up, with the massacre still legible underneath, which may be the more instructive picture. Bruegel died in 1569, two years into Alba's governorship, probably in his forties. He is said to have told his wife to burn certain drawings whose captions were too sharp to survive him. The snow scenes survived. In this one the sky is the soft blue of a skating afternoon, the village is postcard-pretty, and the only thing wrong with the morning, once an emperor had finished editing it, was the geese.