Massacre of the Innocents, after Baccio Bandinelli

This very large engraving of Herod’s slaughter of the newborn received special mention by Vasari, the early biographer of Italian artists and Bandinelli’s acquaintance. He observed that it “called attention to his command of drawing in the figures and his understanding of musculature and anatomy, bringing him great fame throughout Europe.” Recent scholarship has shown that at the time, an impression cost ten times as much as an ordinary engraving, one hundred times as much as a woodcut.