I was walking through the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago when I bumped up against an enormous painting that stopped me in my tracks.
Eight feet high and almost twelve feet long, “The Massacre of the Innocents,” a depiction of the slaying of male babies ordered by King Herod in Bethlehem, placed me cheek by jowl with the most provocatively positioned, beefy male posterior I had ever seen in Western art.