The Massacre of the Innocents from the Abbey Church of St Ouen in Rouen is a powerful surviving fragment of the great Infancy of Christ cycle created during the abbacy of Jean Roussel, between about 1325 and 1339, when St Ouen was one of the most ambitious Gothic building projects in northern France.

The panel captures the violence and emotional distress of Herod’s decree with an immediacy characteristic of early 14th-century Rouen glass painting. In the upper portion, a soldier raises his sword in a vicious diagonal sweep, his body twisted with the force of the gesture. Opposite him, a mother throws herself over her child in a desperate attempt to protect it, her anguished expression emphasised by the strong black contour lines typical of the period. Beneath them, another woman collapses over the tiny, lifeless body of her murdered infant.

The colour scheme is striking: a deep, almost enamel-red background presses the figures forward, intensifying the sense of confinement and terror. The mother’s robe, in vibrant blue, provides a visual anchor, while touches of yellow stain illuminate the soldier’s armour and garments. This deliberate contrast between emotionally charged imagery and refined craftsmanship is one of the hallmarks of Rouen’s High Gothic painting on glass.

Architecturally, the panel is framed by the nascent forms of the Flamboyant canopy: pointed gables and early crockets that show the transition from simple Gothic tabernacles toward the more elaborate 15th-century architectural idiom. The canopy here is still relatively restrained, its function more structural than decorative — an early example of the stylistic vocabulary that later becomes a defining feature of Normandy’s stained-glass tradition.

This window formed part of a continuous narrative sequence that once included the Annunciation, Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, and the Flight into Egypt, all of which would have been read together as a unified theological meditation on the early life of Christ. The Massacre served as the emotional and moral pivot of the series: a moment of horror intended to evoke compassion, sharpen moral awareness, and foreshadow the sufferings of the Passion.

Although the window has undergone restoration — especially in the borders and upper canopy — the central group of figures survives largely intact and retains the distinctive brushwork, colour density, and iconographic clarity of the original 14th-century glass. It remains one of the most vivid examples of the expressive power achieved by the Rouen ateliers during the great flowering of stained glass in northern France in the early 1300s.