If there’s one thing I don’t get about Medieval and Renaissance art, it’s how anyone, in any way shape or form, could look at a chubby pink baby and see a tiny grey old man.
Before a certain point in the history of Western art, babies in paintings were portrayed more or less as very short and small versions of elderly men. How can this possibly be? To be fair, there were only two babies even portrayed in paintings at this time. Pretty much, anyway. I’d say, 99% of all babies in paintings were either Jesus or Saint John the Baptist. And they were cousins. I think.
Anyhoo, since Jesus and Saint Johnny were related and the only babies in paintings before like 1400 or so, maybe the Christ family just looked like that. Like maybe they had that disease where you age really prematurely, and then, Jesus healed them both when he got older. Hey, it’s possible.
I think it’s much safer to say, though, that the Christ babies at age one looked much like you or I did at age one. Big head, short limbs, chubby digits, the whole deal. Little Jesus and St. Johnny probably even pooped their diaper-tunics and spit up their strained figs. Why, then, why, then, did it take hundreds of years for this “revolution” to occur? I can only imagine the way it happened:
Comsimo Di Medici: Hey, how’s that painting coming along?
Giuseppe Genius: Great! I decided to paint the Virgin and Child. I am told you don’t have one in the fifth north ante-bedchamber of your lake home in Mantua yet.
Cosimo Di Medici: It’s true, I don’t. What’s that thing there?
Giuseppe Genius: Which? There? That’s a halo.
Cosimo Di Medici: What? No, no, not the halo. The mushy pinkish thing under it. With the hands.
Giuseppe Genius: Um, that’s the baby Jesus.
Cosimo Di Medici: Nonsense! The baby Jesus looks like a tiny and shriveled old man! That is heresy! We’re gonna have to banish, excommunicate, and/or tie you to horses and rip you apart!
Giuseppe Genius: No! Please! Look closely! Doesn’t it look much like a real infant? Like little Piero Di Medici?
Cosimo Di Medici: Hmm. Why, yes, now that I pry open my normally tightly shut mind, I can see how you’ve taken a real “now” baby and made it look like a “then” baby. And here I just thought the Christ family had that premature aging disease but were healed later when Jesus grew up. Wow! You’re a genius!
Giuseppe Genius: Yes sire, like my father before me.
And: scene.
This is also, I imagine, the origin of the word genius
So what have we learned today? Well we’ve learned that babies have been babies for thousands of years, yet only within the past 500 or so years has anybody stopped to really look at any single damn one of ‘em. Of course, we still don’t know why that is. I mean, they’re so darn cute! People were just lazy, I guess. And stubborn. Like, one time an artist didn’t have a baby around and used a little old man who happened by as his model for the Jesus part instead. And then this artist, through some funny twist of fate, became pretty famous since he painted the first Virgin and Child, and everybody was willing to believe whatever he painted on a canvass or slapped on a plaster wall, fresco style. And all the other artists just copied the general look of his first painting that was hanging in a church in Northern Italy, since it was much easier than finding a real baby wherever the other artists were from. So this little old man became “Jesus” to the entire Christian world, thereby perpetuating some strange myth that Jesus had the premature aging disease, but healed himself when he got older.
Hey, it’s possible.