Propped on a four-wheeled cart and wrapped in clear cellophane, you’d think Peter Paul Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, a visceral masterpiece of epic brutality, might see its impact softened, or at least a little. Think again. “It’s hard to look at, I know,” sighed Sasha Suda, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s curator of European art. On a recent morning in the museum’s conservation department, Suda helped remove the plastic sheeting, revealing the work in all its terrible glory: A burly, naked warrior poised to dash a chubby infant onto the hard stone ground; a mother clawing at another assailant’s face as her own child teetered in her free arm. Even here, in the bright fluorescent glare of the conservation lab’s antiseptic environment, the painting resonated with unrelenting horror. “I’ve always felt like if you poked it the wrong way, it would just explode,” Suda said, pointing towards a knot of fabric and muscle at the painting’s heart. “We’re constantly trying to mitigate the risk of encounter with this work, because it’s so hard for a lot of people.” The painting, removed from both its frame and its long-time place of honour in the museum’s public galleries, was here in the cautious hands of the museum’s conservators to prepare for a very different kind of encounter. On Sept. 26, the Rubens House in Antwerp will be at the centre of “Antwerp Baroque,” a cultural festival honouring the painter as its favourite native son. When it opens, The Massacre of the Innocents, a lost masterpiece made in 1610 and misattributed to a Rubens apprentice for centuries, will finally receive its proper homecoming, some 300 years since it left the country. Here, its absence will be profoundly felt, if not universally lamented. Rubens’ depiction of the biblical tale of King Herod, who ordered the murder of all boys under the age of 2 lest they gr ...
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