BB.AA MUSEUM. Saint Pius V, 9
At first, an exhibition of religious sculpture from the 18th century is not very attractive to ordinary mortals. But this one has its point and we are going to explain why.. Because it is not a sculpture of devotion that seeks the compassion of the parishioner, It is narrative and violent, tries to scare him. It represents the massacre in Bethlehem of newborns and children under two years of age that Herod ordered to be executed., King of Judea, scared by the birth of usurper Jesus. Herod's slaughter of the innocents is a sculptural series—very well-known in the History of Art—by the Valencian José Ginés that is part of the Prince's Nativity Scene., a set of six thousand polychrome baked clay sculptures made between 1789 y 1794 commissioned by Charles II for his son, the future Charles IV. The Museum of Fine Arts shows the sculptures separately, undoing the set, so that we appreciate them in all their magnitude and can explore them from all angles. It is a neoclassical sculpture that is inspired, frequently, in the Laocoön for its composition and its impossible twists, y represents the desperate struggle of women to save their children from the organized violence of men. A woman breastfeeds her dying son while others defend their little ones, with terrified faces bathed in tears, wielding stakes and stones, biting and removing eyeballs from their sockets. Pure theatricalization of pain and tragedy. S.M.
