Scrovegni Chapel

massacre of the innocents

 

Yesterday’s Massacre of the Innocents in Kabul was simply heartbreaking. This drawing today includes both a sketch based on a Reuter’s photo together with one of a section of Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents c. 1305 from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, which moved me so much when we visited twenty years ago. There are no words but a need to express with this drawing outrage, despair and remembrance.

plus ça change…

 

The unbearable agony of a mother about to have her baby torn from her arms in this detail from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The image has haunted me ever since I saw it on our visit to the chapel nearly twenty years ago. It was painted by Giotto di Bondone and is as relevant today as when he painted it over seven hundred years ago.
 

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” -Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849