This truely terrifying image was brought up in art history class today. It’s known by the bland and inoffensive name “Vladimir Virgin”, instead of something more descriptive like “Evil Preemie Elastic Baby Jesus”.
The horror came on gradually. Boy, that head looks small next to Mary. Maybe he’s premature? And what is that gold cloth Mary is carrying? It looks almost like there’s feet sticking out the end, ha ha, but that’s not anywhere near the right length to be connected to that tiny head… What? It is his clothes? How does his neck possibly connect to that… no, no, please tell me that mass isn’t his neck? Please?
HIS HAND! LOOK AT THE CREEPY CLUTCHING HAND!!!
What’s that, professor? You say this is typical of late Byzantine iconography? Please tell me you that you mean that the Virgin-and-Child family motif is what’s typical, and not the specific depicition of Jesus as the twisted offspring of a human fetus and a Slinky.
Shockingly enough, the professor didn’t notice the Our Lady of the Drinking During Pregnancy vibe until I asked her, WHY. She said something about how Byzantine painters using an relatively abstract style. Look, lady, there’s a little abstraction here and there, and then there’s this horror. The artist must have never seen a human child in his life. Either that, or all the kids he knew were born horribly deformed.
I may have nightmares about that thing showing up under my bed. Anyone know the number of a good exorcist?
I had a humanities teacher in high school who used to call pre-Rennaisance depictions of the infant Jesus “little baby truck driver Jesus” - because the artists of the time simply didn’t know how to draw children, so they just painted a scaled-down adult, so Jesus looked like a teensy truck driver more often than not.
But yeah, that little pinheaded-Stretch-Armstrong Messiah is creeeepy.
The body proportions there look like it could be a scaled-down adult, but even given that, the head is still too small. It’s like the artist said “No, wait, babies’ heads aren’t the same scale relative to their bodies as adults’”, but then “fixed” it by making the head smaller, instead of larger.
I’m familiar with medieval religious paintings where Jesus is portrayed as 30 feet high compared to a king who’s about 15 feet high compared to lesser mortals who are about 2 feet high and the mathematical proportions was propaganda, but I’m surprised to see Jesus taking such relative tininess to his mother.
That scared me too, but I think that’s because the paint flaked and discolored. She probably started out with normal hands.
Whereas with Jesus H(orrifying) Christ there, there’s no way it could have looked normal at the start.
