When is a painting finished? Is it the moment when the artist lays down his or her brush? Or when the canvas is signed?
Or do great pictures have a life of their own, continuing to evolve even after they leave the studio?
Of course, colours can fade or darken over the years, but meaning can change, too, depending on who owns a work of art, where it is displayed and how it is treated.
Time itself can impinge on the reading of an image when a later generation interprets it through the prism of its own experience, often in ways that the artist may never have intended.
There could be no better example of this phenomenon than Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents in the Royal Collection.
Painted in 1565-67 and acquired more than a century later by Charles II, it shows a snow-covered Flemish village in the dead of winter, with new-fallen snow covering pitched roofs, icicles hanging from eaves, bare branches, a frozen pond and patches of hard earth visible under trampled snow.
This bleak landscape makes a suitable backdrop for a scene of pure horror — the murder by King Herrod’s soldiers of all male children in Palestine under the age of 2.
But, instead of setting the Biblical story in a faraway land in the distant past, Bruegel shows men and women of his own time, dressed in contemporary clothing and living in a prosperous village with two-storey brick houses and a substantial church of stone.
A bird’s-eye view of the carnage
A master of narrative invention, he steps back to give us a bird’s-eye view of the carnage so that our eye must move slowly across the picture surface to examine each heart-rending episode in turn: a father falls to his knees to beg a mounted solider to spare his child; a couple implore a killer to take their daughter instead of their son; troops use pikes, axes and a battering ram to break down doors; mounted knights in armour guard the approach to the village to block the only means of escape.
So beautifully painted is every detail that we can almost hear the cries of anguish carried in the cold air, the grunts of the soldiers and the methodical clink of cold steel.
Instead of slitting the throats of infants, the soldiers are killing turkeys, a goose and a doe. Distraught mothers weep not over bloody corpses, but over hams, a cheese or nondescript bundles spread out in the snow.
This is because the picture we see today looks very different from the one Bruegel painted.
The first owner, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, ordered that all the dead babies be painted out and replaced with animals, objects and foodstuffs.
His intention was to turn a scene of massacre into one of mere plunder. Perhaps the subject was too distressing for a collector as cultivated as Rudolph, but more likely the Emperor did not feel comfortable with a picture showing the massacre by a king of his own subjects.
Rudolph’s alterations created a scene that to modern sensibilities may be even more resonant of calculated evil than the picture as originally painted.
For one thing, the absence of blood and gore creates an atmosphere of eerie stillness, as though we are watching a silent film in slow motion.
Then, too, the changes somehow make the actions of the soldiers in rounding up their victims look more deliberate than frenzied.
Instead of slaughtering their victims on the spot, it now looks as though the army is taking the children away to be disposed of elsewhere.
Because we aren’t distracted by the sight of blood in the snow, it is easy to imagine the scene after the troops have gone, when numb silence descends on the village once more, leaving these people to face their loss.
