look closer

The armored troop under a forest of lances, the commander in black at its center. The Netherlands read one duke into that beard for four centuries.

Bruegel painted the Massacre of the Innocents around 1566 and set it ten minutes from his front door: a Brabant village under snow, armored horsemen blocking the square, soldiers working 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, and 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 the long-bearded officer as the Duke of Alba, whose Council of Troubles would shortly be sentencing Netherlanders to death at a rate that earned it the name Council of Blood. The painting told the truth so plainly that it was eventually corrected. By the early seventeenth century the panel belonged to the emperor Rudolf II in Prague, a collector of wonders with no appetite for this one, and at his order the children were 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. What had been the most dangerous picture in the Habsburg collection became a genre scene of soldiers plundering a village, and hung comfortably for centuries. The panel in the Royal Collection is Bruegel's original, still wearing Rudolf's edits; infrared imaging shows the children beneath the geese, and copies made by Bruegel's son before the censorship preserve the uncorrected scene. 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, in his early forties, having reportedly told his wife to burn certain drawings whose captions were too biting 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.