The massacre of the innocents

Have you ever seen anything in your life that just made you gasp and you couldn’t take your eye off of it? Even a tear running down your eye wasn’t enough to express the feelings that were taking place inside. An unexplainable feeling of mixed emotions, a hair lifting sensation came over me at the MET museum on Friday after I saw what I am about to explain. I thought my love for art was at its highest and couldn’t go beyond, but my love for art has grown tremendously after I laid my eyes on the beautiful Francois-Joseph Navez’s “The Massacre of the Innocents.” A painting that no matter the writer;can’t be explained with words, but needs to be seen personally. ” Navez was a Belgian neo-classical painter student of Jacques-Louis in Paris. “This is an intimate family drama who’s frightening realism struck many critics” and definitely struck me.
The overall painting is pure pain for anyone that is looking at it. The first thing that comes to mind when you see the painting is mothers trying to protect their children from getting killed. There are two scenes painted, in the front and far in the back. The front part of the painting there are three women and two children. In the far right corner there is a woman wearing a dark robe and a red cloth wrapped around her forehead holding a child. This is not the most important scene in the whole painting but it has such a deep story. The mother is covering the child’s mouth as the child cries. Every time I look at the mother I get chills because you see the worry in her eyes and the sickening color she has to her. Navez definitely gave her skin color a green color so you can feel her pain. It’s as if she is sick to her stomach because she knows if her child is found he will be killed. Also the redness under the child’s eyes and the extended arm shows that he has been crying for a long time and is very uncomfortable or bothered because of what is being done to him by his mother.
The largest painted scene is of two women and