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.
The naked butt jutted out, forcing the viewer of the painting to gaze up at the massive glutes and thighs, much like the mother of the unfortunate infant under the murderer’s knife.
By comparison, the bathing soldiers in Michelangelo’s “The Battle of Cascina” (1504) — the Renaissance standard when it comes to portrayals of muscular.