I have recently discovered that there seems to be something of a widespread notion that babies in medieval paintings look “creepy.” I have never personally thought that babies in medieval paintings look particularly “creepy,” but this seems to be a notion that a lot of other people have.
Even if you’re like me and you don’t think that medieval babies necessarily look “creepy,” there is no denying that babies in a lot of medieval paintings don’t exactly look like real-life babies. Instead, for the most part, they look like tiny middle-aged men. The reason why they are portrayed this way is actually extremely fascinating and has to do with the way people in the Middle Ages thought about the purpose of art.
A look at some medieval babies
First, before we start talking about them, let’s look at some pictures of medieval babies. If you’ve never looked at babies in medieval paintings, this may come as a bit of a surprise. In any case, here they are:
ABOVE: Early thirteenth-century tesselated icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula depicting the Madonna and child
ABOVE: Thirteenth-century tempera and gold on wood icon of the Madonna and child by the Italian painter Berlinghiero Berlinghieri
ABOVE: Icon of the Madonna and child painted between 1270 and 1280 by the Italian painter Meliore di Jacopo
ABOVE: Icon of the Madonna and child painted between 1310 and 1320 by the Master of San Martino alla Palma
ABOVE: Thirteenth or fourteenth-century Kretan icon of the Madonna and child, “Our Lady of Perpetual Hope”
You may notice that all of the images I have just shown are images of the infant Jesus being held in the arms of his mother Mary. That is because not all babies in medieval art look like tiny middle-aged men; it’s mainly just the infant Christ who is portrayed that way and he is portrayed that way for one very complex reason.
What art meant for people in the Middle Ages
Now, before we talk about those baby Jesuses I just showed you, let’s talk about what “art” meant for people in the Middle Ages, because understanding the way medieval artists thought about their work is absolutely vital if you want to understand why they portrayed the infant Jesus the way they did. You see, for people in Europe during the Middle Ages, the fundamental goal of art had very little to do with realism or even necessarily aesthetics. For medieval artists, the primary goal of all art was to convey a theologically correct message.
People in Europe during the Middle Ages regularly heard the gospels preached in church. Despite this, most ordinary people never actually sat down and read the gospels themselves at any point in their entire life. This was not just because the vast majority of ordinary people in the Middle Ages were illiterate, but also because books were extremely rare and expensive, because they had to be copied by hand. Therefore, most ordinary people, even if they could read, lacked the financial means to obtain their own personal copy of the gospels.
On top of this, for most of the Middle Ages, in western Europe, the gospels were mainly only available in Latin translation and most ordinary people could not understand Latin. The Greek east, things were a little better, since the gospels were available in Greek, which was the language ordinary people actually spoke, but, even there, the gospels were written in a rather archaic form of Greek that most people did not use on a daily basis.
ABOVE: First page of the Gospel of John from the Book of Kells, a lavishly-illustrated ninth-century copy of the four gospels in Latin. You can tell this book was clearly not the sort of thing a peasant could afford. Obviously, not all copies of the gospels were nearly this lavish, but they still tended to be well out of the price range for your average peasant.
This is where art becomes important, because it was believed that ordinary people could learn about the gospels through art. Art was thought of as what you might call “the gospel of the commoners.” It was seen as a means by which the artist could educate the common folk viewing his work of art about the gospel. Obviously, educating people about theology wasn’t the only role that art was thought to play during the Middle Ages, but this was certainly an important and fundamental aspect of how people in the Middle Ages thought about art.
There was a persistent belief in the Middle Ages that, if an artist represented something in a way that was not theologically correct, God would punish him for his heresy. A fragment of a lost work written by the early sixth-century AD Greek writer Theodoros Anagnostes records a miracle story about how, in around 465 AD, God supposedly punished an artist who portrayed Jesus in a manner too closely reminiscent of the Greek god Zeus for his offense by causing his arm to wither. Theodoros Anagnostes writes, as translated by Joan E. Taylor:
“A certain artist painting an image of the Lord Christ lost strength in his hand, and they say that, as instructed by a certain Hellene, he’d painted the work of the image in the appearance of the name of the Saviour, but with the hairs of the head divided in two ways, so the eyes are not covered, since by forms such as this the children of Hellenes paint Zeus, in order for the observers to recognize that instead of the Saviour the adoration is to be assigned (to Zeus), being more truly curly-locked and hairy [than Christ].”
Clearly, medieval artists—especially icon-painters—believed it was very important for their works of art to convey exactly the right theological message.
Theological messages about the adult Jesus in medieval art
The reason why the infant Christ is shown in medieval art as looking like a miniature fully-grown man is because medieval artists were primarily trying to convey a theological point about the nature of Christ. They did this with depictions of the adult Jesus as well. For instance, here is an encaustic panel painting of Christos Pantokrator from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. It dates to around the sixth century AD. It may be the oldest surviving icon of its kind:
You probably noticed something really weird about Jesus’s face in this icon. For some reason, it’s messed up; it’s asymmetrical. The left half of his face is painted different from the right half.
The reason for this is because the artist who painted this icon was trying to convey a theological message about the dual nature of Christ. He was trying to illustrate through this painting that Christ is simultaneously both divine and human. Thus, one side of Jesus’s face in this painting represents his human aspect and the other side represents his divine aspect.
Obviously, the artist who painted this icon did not really think that the two sides of Jesus’s actual face looked different from each other; that would be silly. Instead, the artist was using symbolism in order to represent Jesus’s spiritual and metaphysical nature, because, to medieval artists, that was what mattered more than anything else.
Medieval depictions of the baby Jesus
Medieval artists had the exact same goal when they produced their paintings of the baby Jesus that the artist who painted the Christos Pantokrator icon from Sinai had when he painted the adult Jesus’s face. They were not trying to create realistic-looking babies and failing, but rather trying to represent a complex, theologically correct message about the fundamental nature of Christ.
Now, you may be wondering what sort of message medieval artists were trying to convey by portraying the baby Jesus as looking like a tiny middle-aged man. In the Middle Ages, it was widely accepted as a dogma of the Christian faith throughout Europe that God is immutable and unchanging. Medieval Christians believed that the way God is now is the exact same way He has always been.
Throughout the Middle Ages, it was also widely accepted that Jesus is one of the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity. That means medieval Christians believed that Jesus is God incarnate. Therefore, because Jesus is God and God is immutable and unchanging, medieval Christians believed that Jesus was immutable and unchanging. Medieval artists therefore sought to depict this dogma in art by portraying the infant Jesus as a homunculus, a tiny human being with the appearance of an adult.
The reason why all those medieval babies look so weird, then, is because the artists who painted those babies are trying to remind you that Jesus is immutable and unchanging.
The end of the creepy medieval babies
Ultimately, during the Renaissance, the idea of trying to relay theological concepts through icons gradually became less prominent. Instead, as artists began paying closer attention to surviving works of Greek and Roman art, they began striving for greater realism in their works.
Thus, depictions of the infant Jesus that were produced during the Renaissance are, in many cases, far more realistic than the depictions of the infant Jesus that were produced during the Middle Ages. Here are some examples of adorable Renaissance babies:
ABOVE: Madonna and Child, painted in 1400 by the Italian painter Taddeo di Bartolo
ABOVE: Madonna of the Carnation, painted between c. 1475 and c. 1478 by the Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci
ABOVE: The Madonna of the Pinks, painted by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, probably sometime before 1507
ABOVE: Madonna del Granduca, painted in 1505 by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael
ABOVE: Maria Hilf, painted c. 1530 by the Dutch Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder
Conclusion
During the Middle Ages, artists depicted the infant Jesus as a homunculus, a “little man,” in order to emphasize the Christian teaching that Jesus’s nature is immutable and unchanging; he was the same man as an infant that he would later be as an adult during his ministry. During the Renaissance, however, the broader artistic focus shifted away from theology and towards realism. As a result of this shift in artistic thinking, artists began to depict the infant Jesus in a more naturalistic manner, looking like a real infant.
Thank you for this article, it settles a lot of wondering and uncertainty on my part when contemplating Byzantine and Renaissance painting in museums. I think that the Renaissance way of painting could be considered more realistic compared to what had been there before, but it is also very stylised: no more homunculi, but putti! I mean, even if the putto looks more realistic, it is still conceptual, and as repetitive, in spite of variations. I mean, the transition shows the ideology had changed – artists did the same thing, translate current cultural ideas into pictorial terms. I find indeed very disturbing that the Catholic Church allowed this injection of paganism at all – I wonder why. You end up with a naked Christ, showing his body to the world. This cannot be theologically justifiable.
I have found in my museum peregrinations that a realistic way of painting children made itself felt in art when women artists tackled the subject. That must have been very late in the day, probably 18th c at the earliest??? In your research, have you come across early examples? it would be interesting to see if there is a departure from the putto to a naturalistic perspective, even in religious art, and I’m guessing if there is one, it is more likely to be in the work of a woman rather than in that of a man. If the Church allowed a woman to work in decoration at all, which may not have been the case.
Hi Roxana, i’ve been roaming through the articles of this blog these days and i saw your question posted more than a year ago, so i don’t know if you’ll be notified or not of my answer… Anyway, if you want to see a baby Jesus and other religious painting by women before the 18th cent. in a museum (after this Covid mess ends) you can. There have been a lot of female paintresses in 1550 onwards (so during the Manierismo and Baroque periods), the majority of them in Italy. And some of these works were commissioned by rich bishops, cardinals and even some Popes! For example, Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was called “La pontificia pittora” (the Paintress of the Pope), because she worked for a while for Gregory XIII; Fede Galizia; Sofonisba Anguissola; and Artemisia Gentileschi, author of Madonna col Bambino (1610-11, Galleria Spada in Rome), which is probably the painting you’re looking for, Adorazione dei Magi (1636-37, Pozzuoli), and Nascita di san Giovanni Battista (Museo del Prado), where you can see an infant John the Baptist.
Your premise that medieval painters wanted to pass the message that Jesus’s nature is unchangeable, thus explaining why baby Jesus was depicted as a “little man”, is very interesting, and gives a possible answer to this question that I’ve wondered about a few times myself. But it would become more scientifically plausible if you could provide a “control” case, i.e., the correct depiction of a baby in a medieval painting. Otherwise, the supposition that painters of that time simply *didn’t know* how to depict babies sounds just as valid. Indeed, to me it sounds even more persuasive, given that painters of that time were clueless about lots of other things in visual arts, such as perspective, correct lighting conditions, how color changes according to distance, the correct proportions of even the *adult* human body, how to correctly depict animals (sheep, dogs, cats), and many more. Why should they *know* how to correctly depict babies?
Nonetheless, your supposition of them wanting to pass a message could be true *in addition* to their said lack of technical skills.
I agree with this theory. Christians wanted to empathise Christ’s humanity but not an evoving growth in knowledge so even as a baby he was conscious of who he was, a part of the divine trinity. The story of his discussions with the learned Jewish scholars while still a child was cited. Even to-day icon painters do not emphasise his baby quality. The fact that he went through a birth and growing up is considered important but not just a typical baby.
The Renaissance pictures of the mother and child are pictures of attractive women with a baby with little religious meaning. The earlier religious pictures or icons have to be read.