The Royal Collection: bloody secrets of a masterpiece

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, as I believe, have a life of their own, continuing to evolve even after they leave the studio?

The Royal Collection: Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Bruegel the Elder
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.

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