May 19

Why Babies in Medieval Paintings Look Grown Up

Paintings of old-looking babies abounded during the Middle Ages. Some even had six-packs. Why?

Religious Middle Ages painting of a manly looking baby Jesus — A manly baby Jesus with a six-pack | Bequest of Edward Fowles, 1971, Metropolitan Museum of Art | Public Domain

The reasoning, like all things artistic in the Middle Ages, has - as you might already have guessed - to do with religion. In those early days of artistic expression, the church was responsible for commissioning most of the portraits of babies and children. And they didn’t want just any old baby - they wanted the baby Jesus.

Medieval artists espoused the concept of homunculus, which literally means “little man,” or the belief that Jesus was born “perfectly formed and unchanged,” Matthew Averett, an art history professor at Creighton University, told Vox. Therefore, paintings of Jesus showed him with adult features and physiques, even when the purported child is sitting in his mother’s lap, playing with her robes, or breastfeeding.

This homuncular, adult-looking baby Jesus became the standard for all children, an exemplar that stuck in the Middle Ages because artists at the time had, according to Averett, a “lack of interest in naturalism, and they veered more toward expressionistic conventions.”

Happily, the ugly baby trend gradually disappeared during the Renaissance - a cultural movement in Europe marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. It generally covers the 15th and 16th centuries, when artists applied realism and scientific precision to their figurative works.

During the Renaissance, non-religious art also flourished because the rising middle and upper classes could afford portraits of their family members. The wealthy patrons wanted representations of their darling children that reflected well on the parents, with little boys and girls who were cute. Therefore, representations of babies moved away from the hyper-stylized homuncular and never looked back.

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