Look, I couldn’t draw unemployment, so I’m not criticizing the overall-poor standard of early/medieval pictorial techniques – from what little I know, everything in European art before about 1400 was painted with little regard for depth, proportion, perspective, etc., and I gather that this was due to a combination of lack of geometric/drafting technique, as well as to convention.
My question is, when the Renaissance era guys finally started painting people that looked like people, why were they still so awful at certain things – and particularly, at making a baby look anything like an actual baby? Any European art gallery will have about 200 works entitled La Vierge et Enfant, and almost all of them will show an insanely misshapen, or gigantic, or way-too-mature-for-his-years, Christ child. I have never specifically heard that this was intentional or a convention by which the Baby Jesus was purposefully enlarged to symbolize his importance, etc., and the infant misproportionality, etc. seems to appear also in pictures of secular moms and kids. I saw one Madonna col Bambino in the Uffizi in which the newborn Jesus, at about four feet long and with gangly limbs and wispy tonsure, resembled nothing more than Gollum.
So what gives? The adult figures in these pictures often look pretty realistic, so I gather the artists were capable of, and aiming at, verisimilitude. I can also understand trying to dress things up just a bit, so as to give some prominence to both the Madonna and Christ child – after all, real babies are tiny compared to their moms, and might not show up as much more than a wrinkly red blob. But sometimes it just seems that the artist had no idea what he was doing. I have <never> seen a Renaissance era picture of an infant that remotely resembled an actual newborn.
Are babies one of those things, like hands and necks, that I seem to recall hearing are just inherently devilishly tricky to draw/paint?
From what I recall when traveling in Europe and doing my best to learn about the art I saw, a significant change in accurate depiction of many things, including babies, all happened at around the same time: mid 1500s? perhaps. Babies’ heads are proportionately 1/4 the length of their bodies, whereas adult heads are proportionately 1/6 the length of their bodies, I believe. It took artists a long time to grasp that concept.
Also, I think I remember learning that artists generally tried to make Christ look like he had all the knowledge of his significance even in infancy, which is part of why he looks like an old man even though he’s supposed to be a baby in the paintings. In the Academia museum in Florence (which houses Michaelangelo’s David), almost all of the artwork is religious in nature, and you go through the exhibit from earliest to latest in art. You can see the dramatic difference in the way babies (Christ) were painted from viewing the exhibit from beginning to end.
I did see the Academmia. Cool stuff (esp. the materials on the restoration techniques).
However – I still maintain that there and elsewhere, even as the overall portraiture skill increased dramatically from the 1200-1300 period – the baby stuff remained, uniformly, bad. I can understand not wanting to portray the Christ child as the wrinkly beet-red prune that most new-borns actually are. But geez, at least get the size and the head configuration right, guys. I have to think some of these talented Renaissance painters could have come up with a Bambino that looked like he might actually have bodily emerged recently from La Madonna, with legitimately infantile features and proportions, yet still having visible attributes of wisdom, sanctity, comparative self-awareness, etc. But, IANARP.
I dont know how sound this theory is but I heard from a psychology lesson that until the 18th (I think) century, Children were viewed as little more than minature adults and there was no notion of adolescence. The evidence of this was that artists before that time drew children as scaled down adults because thats how they viewed them.
Personally, I think its a bit suspect but I’m not an artist nor a child psychologist.
Have you ever tried to get a baby to pose for you while you paint him/her?
Seriously, though, Renaissance art is usually characterized by a greater naturalism in depictions of babies. Up until the fourteenth century, babies like the Christ Child are still rendered with adult proportions. With artists like Giotto, however, he starts to look a little more like a real baby. Renaissance art historians like to contrast Madonna and Child paintings by Cimabue with Giotto–the former artist still paints the Christ Child with adult proportions, while the latter paints him with more baby-like proportions. Admittedly, Giotto’s baby heads are still too small for a completely naturalistic baby, but the arms and legs are much better proportioned, and he’s even got a little baby fat (unlike Cimabue’s more svelte infants).
By the fifteenth century, when the Renaissance really begins as an artistic period, most artists are painting fairly naturalistic babies: Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Perugino, etc. By the turn of the sixteenth century, artists are not only painting realistic babies, but really cute and pinchable ones, too. Look at any of Raphael’s Madonnas. The Venetians, like Giovanni Bellini and Titian, particularly excelled at painting very realistic-looking, and very adorable, babies.
In fact, I’d say that throughout the 1400s and 1500s, the great majority of artists are painting very naturalistic babies. The misshapen babies that you describe sound more like pre-Renaissance babies to me–the kind you’ll find in medieval and proto-Renaissance altarpieces from the 13th and 14th centuries. Most artists during those earlier periods still adhered to the older conventions, with some exceptions, like the aforementioned Giotto. However, by the early 15th century, the babies already exhibit more baby-like proportions and features. If you’re looking at any ill-proportioned babies from the 15th-16th century, the artist is probably really provincial or just not very good.
They may have been somewhat recognized as “children” but they certainly weren’t treated the way we modern folks think children should be.
It wasn’t until around the Victorian era that the concept of “childhood” as being a seperate, and important, stage in life really developed. Before then, children weren’t encouraged to play and explore.
The children of the wealthy and nobility began incredibly intense schooling as soon as they left the cradle. (The son of Henry VIII was able to write fluent Greek before he was nine.)
Advice manuals of the Tudor age (a bit later than our discussion, but it’s the era with which I’m most familiar) cautioned parents not to show affection to children out of fear of ruining their moral development. Some scholars have speculated that one of the reasons parents were encouraged not to grow attatched to their children was because the infant mortality rate was so high.
Children were seen as morally frail creatures, in which any flaw in deportment or morals should be punished swiftly and severely. Fear of the parents was a notion encouraged in children.
Wealthy parents saw their children twice a day, if the histories of the era are to be believed. They were handed over to wet nurses after birth, and then to tutors after they were weaned. In the morning and evening, the child was presented to the parents to ask for their “blessing.” Sometimes, they became “wards” of other noble families in order to teach them how to behave at court.
The children of the wealthy were dressed in exact replicas of adult clothing-- in some cases, including miniature swords. Tiny girls were crammed into corsets.
The children of the wealthy married very early. Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII, gave birth to her first child at age thirteen. Negotiations could begin at birth. Consummation waited at least until the girl began mentruating, but was usually in her teens, especially when the family desperately needed an heir.
The children of the poor were expected to work as soon as they were physically capable. They most likely had no toys to speak of, since the family’s material possessions would be few, and they had little leisure time to play with them, anyway. Every had was needed for labor.
I agree, but the children of only 50 years ago also weren’t treated quite as we think they should be. They still were not considered to be small adults.
Ironically, the Victorian age was the heyday of virtual child slavery in the new factories and mills. This sprung up at the same time as the sentimental Victorian cult of the child, which fed off of the horror stories of the Industrial Revolution.
Edward VI’s education did not begin until he was six. His fluent Greek was the result of studying it at such a young age, as children pick up on languages much more quickly than do adults. He studied, writes Alison Weir, “several hours a day,” which by my reckoning would leave him a good deal of time to play. And he had companions to play with: he was educated with 14 other boys of the nobility, for his father wanted him to have contact with other kids. Henry may have regretted this to an extent: the boys would dare Edward to use course langauge. Edward wasn’t interested in sports, but he participated in races and liked to watch tournaments. His older sister Mary lavished him with presents. His sister Elizabeth, only four years older than he, had to be carried by Edward Seymour at his her brother’s christening, on account of “her tender age.”
If these manuals had to caution, it goes to show that much affection was being shown. Ballads and poems written on the subject of young children dying emphasize the grief of the parents, a grief that rings true to today’s parents.
True. But spare the rod, spoil the child was underlining parenting philosophies a century ago as well. And this vision of children as morally frail is more in line with a vision of children, little humans who need to be guided and cared for, than with a vision of miniature adults.
This pattern of behavior lasted among the rich into the twentieth century. Nannies and early boarding school are still available for some segments of societies. In the 1970s, Diane and Egon Von Furstenburg lived in a separate home from their two young children and their nannies.
Today little girls can wear thongs and platform shoes.
Margaret Beaufort’s experience of early childbirth led her to anxiously petition for her son and grandchildren to postpone consummation (just not marriage). I do agree that the concept of adolescence was different than today’s, but kids were not plunged full-scale into adulthood. For example, it was decided by both families that Margaret’s grandson Arthur and his bride Catherine of Aragon, both teenagers, would not live together at first. Catherine would live with Arthur’s mother and grandmother, no doubt under their tutelege–a sort of apprentice Queen. There is no evidence that either Catherine or Arthur had much input into these plans.
In addition, these early marriages were far less common outside of the nobility, who made up 1 or 2% of the population.
My theory is that my great-grandfather, who went into the mines at age 11 circa 1905, had less leasure time than your average 11-year-old farmworker circa 1500. Today we can see this pattern of labor in undeveloped countries, but we also see that these kids, with no toys and forced to work horrific hours and horrific tasks, can sometimes find time to run in packs in the streets and play. And we can see that their parents consider them to be children.
Anyway, the depiction of children in sources from Shakespeare’s plays to the lives of the saints back to the Tale of Chaucer’s Prioress show kids behaving in recognizable kid ways. Shakespeare’s children are more like the kids I know than some of the prococious little smacktalkers on sitcom television.
Genetics baby! Kids back then were hideous! What’s more, they grew up to be hideous! SO hideous in fact, that nobody would touch them with a ten foot pole! No offspring = less hideous progeny. Let’s all work together to rid the world of the ugly gene in our lifetime.
One point to remember is that in traditional Christian iconography, the infant Christ is painted with the proportions of an adult. This is to show that He is not an ordinary child, but is in fact God. Icons are not meant to look realistic, but are an idealized depiction of reality; hence, nobody ever really cared that the infant Christ didn’t look like a real infant. Western Christianity largely abandoned iconography around the time of the Renaissance in favor of realistic paintings, but Eastern Orthodoxy still makes heavy use of icons, and we still paint infants as looking like little adults.
In my art history classes in college, it was explained that there was a huge pressure on many artists to incorporate the images and faces of their commisioners/financers into their paintings. This was their way of “selling shares of stock” in their product, their wealthy benefactors would then get their images placed prominently in the painting, usually as other figures or people in the scene. Often, this was even done with their children and infants that they painted. To make an infant resemble the features of Mayor Blahdideeblah of Tuscany, the features often ended up extremely adult looking.
Other times, it was simply reflective of the artist using an adult model for the face structure and expression. Infants just can’t hold that “Heavenly benevolence mixed with omniscience and caring” expression for hours on end.
This was also often done in reverse, where an artist would make political commentary or insult someone by incorporating their features into a demon, gargoyle, fool, etc.
I know that religious art was the main subject matter of medieval Western Europe, but are there surviving pre-1400 portraits of infants who were not Christ or saintly children? If so, were they more realistic and less creepy than the wizened baby Jesus?
Portraits of infant royalty may not count here, since the artist may have felt compelled to make them look more princely or ducal, and thus less cuddly.
I’d like to see a cite for this. Patrons do often appear in paintings, although usually they are separated from the holy figures, often set to the side kneeling in prayer. Sometimes, though, the patron might even be depicted interacting as a character from a religious narrative–e.g., Gozzoli painted the Magi and members of their entourage with the features of the Medici family (and friends) in the Medici Chapel frescoes. This was still more of the exception than the norm in Renaissance art (one had to be extraordinarily wealthy, like the Medici, to get yourself painted in the guise of a Biblical character).
But I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an adult patron painted in the form of an infant. I’m not saying there never was one, but I honestly can’t think of one.
Well, and there are other advice manuals from the 1500s-1600s that disagree with “punish them severely for the slightest fault”. There were manuals out there that said that, while punishment was important, it was also important not to break a child’s will, and that the best way to teach your children proper behavior was to be a good example to them.
That concept predates Victoria by 1800 years at least:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13
Matthew 18
He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Clearly childhood was seen as being distinct from adulthood and an important learning phase 2000 years ago. That view of childhood was so widespread that it could be used as an illustration of a novel concept when talking to illiterate peasants.
Sorry, but I calls bullshit. There are a large number of toys known from archaeological and historical data dating from all ages, going back at least to ancient Egypt. Rocking horses, toy animals and most especially dolls and action figures/toy soldiers have always been very widespread in all sections of the population.
If children were not encouraged to play and explore it is a little hard to explain why they would be given a wooden cow or a rag doll.
The children of the middle classes undergo more or less the same regime today. Child-care starts at about 2, kindergarten at 5 and then continuous schooling. I gather that many European children are fluent in foreign languages before they are nine. I can’t see this as evidence that we don’t see our children as being children. It’s a sign that busy people use education because they need to.
And she paid the price and made damn sure it didn’t happen to her children. Whether it was planned or accidental is unknown, but it was certainly undertaken by a naïve young girl who did not understand the consequences and who regretted the decision.
Which makes it exactly like today, where many girls give birth at 13 even when we have birth control and abortion on demand. What that tells me is that there is a biological cause for this that parents cannot control and that it is not due to treating children as adults.
I have seen studies suggesting that the rate of early-teen pregnancy is higher today than ever before in history, though I remain sceptical. The point is that the rate of pregnancy in 13 year olds has always been about the same as it is today.
That just isn’t true. All families have always had toys. They were rarely fancy, but then few things were in a pre-industrial age. Clay tops were extremely common in Norse settlements for example. Writings show they were children’s toys. Wooden swords, rag dolls and so forth are also common in medieval European towns.
Even in the poorest families, young children never worked 8 hour days routinely. Young children were assigned chores, as they are today. Taking the ducks to the water or bringing in the firewood were common. These tasks would take about 15 minutes. Most of the day young children were free. By the age of 10 children would be working 3 or four hours at a stretch, or all day at light duties such as watching livestock. That essentially leaves them most of the day to play. During crisis times, such as a rain-delayed harvest, children were essentially expected to work until they dropped, but everyone was. It was work and get tired, or don’t work and die. Chidlren worked out of dire need, not due to some ignorance on the part of parents that kids aren;t adults.
All evidence suggests that they had far more free time than modern children expected to sit on school 5 hours a day. I know of no references to a child being expected to put in a solid day’s work constantly. Although I don’t doubt that some families worked their children excessively hard it isn’t considered to be common, or even socially accepted. there are some examples of medieval poetry condemning tradesmen for working their apprentices all day and never granting ‘holy days’. Chaining children to machines was a practice of the industrial ages, not of the renaissance.
And then, you have Augustine (also predating the Renaissance), who says that children learn best through curiousity than through fear of punishment. (From his “Confessions”…bolding mine…and he does say that fear of punishment is neccesary to avoid evil)
True. Perhaps I should have said differentiated between the children of the poor and the children of the wealthy in the Victorian era. The concept of child labor certainly wasn’t a new one.
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Perhaps, but stories such as that of Jane Grey’s childhood weren’t that uncommon. Just like today, parents obey or ignore the advice of the “experts” at will. I’m sure there were deeply loving and tender parents, just as there were cold and distant parents.
I would gander to say that due to the fact that poor parents were more likely to keep their children at home that they were generally more affectionate than the wealthy.
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The concept was that they didn’t need loving care so much as they needed careful watching for signs of moral failings.
[quote] Today little girls can wear thongs and platform shoes. **
Yes, they can but average parents don’t dress their children that way as a matter of course. Thongs are the exception, rather than the rule-- something which we exclaim in surprise at seeing.
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IIRC, there were concerns over Arthur’s health, which was probably the reason that cunsumation was delayed in this case. It was believed at the time that sexual activity might prove too strenuous for frail or sickly people.
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Very true. Property concerns were the main reason for early marriage. The poor often had an unheard of luxury: marriage for love.
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But this raises the question of whether these were intended to be realistic portraits of children, or, like the smacktalking children in sitcoms, were an exaggerated portrayal.
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I think that I may not have illustrated my point clearly. Yes, they understood that children were children, they just didn’t see it as a carefree time of play and wonderment the way we think of it today.
The culture of the Renaissance was much different than the culture of ancient times. That first Bible quote you used was often used to illustrate the point that children must be stringently controlled, lest their foolishness lead them into a life of sin.
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Again, the ancient world had different views than that of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. Also, just because such toys exist doesn’t mean that all children had them.
Toys were generally hand-made until the Victorian era, when manufacturing allowed for mass-produced, cheap and widely-available items. Most of the old toys you see in museums come from this time.
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The education of the children of the nobility seems to be much more rigorous than education today. For a child as young as six to be studying the ancient philosophers in the original languages is quite an accomplishment, and could not have been achieved without intense study. The fact that they *understood * the sometimes obscure and vague philosphical arguments at that age is remarkable in of itself.
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It ususally wasn’t the girl’s decision to make. The parents decided who she would marry, and when the couple should consumate.
Nor were children kept sexually ignorant. Margaret would have been quite aware of what marriage entailed, and that she was expected to give birth as quickly as possible.
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I wasn’t trying to suggest that children were worked to death. However, for poor families, there was a LOT of work which needed to be done in order just to survive. The idea that children would have been excused from working in the fields along side their parents in order to play doesn’t make much sense. As I said, every pair of hands was needed. The youngest children were given the lightest tasks, but a strong nine year old boy would have been laboring much as his father was.
In ealier days, farm life was hard. The parents barely had any leisure time themselves. There was constantly a task which needed done: picking weeds, milkling cows, chopping firewood, gathering food, cleaning, cooking, sewing, tending younger children, carrying water (which is a lot harder than it sounds-- water is heavy) rendering milk into cheese and butter, taking produce to market, butchering, curing meats and hides, etc. Work was devided according to sex, but neither had much leisure time.
That seems at odds with all the examples given so far.
No it isn’t. It’s a clear injunction that children must think and learn in different ways to adults, and that such is quite appropriate for children, but not for grown men. It never implies that being childish is a sin in children, Indeed taken in context it quite clearly says that being childish is a good thing for a child, but not for an adult. Coupled with the quote form Jesus that children learn knew concepts better because of their unquestioning nature, there is little room for doubt that people 200 years ago accepted and even cherished childhood as a time of innocent learning.
The examples I gave included the Middle Ages or Renaissance. Toys and games turn up in literature and archaeology from these periods at about the rate you would expect if all children had toys and played games. There is no reason to assume tha this wasn’t the case.
I don’t know enough to comment. The hours on average weren’t any longer from all accounts. I’m not sure how else to measure intensity. A modern 6 year old couldn’t read Latin, that’s true, but I doubt a 6 year old then knew that germs cause disease either. What is learned varies. I doubt the amount of knowledge does.
Again, that isn’t true. There are numerous cases of weddings without consummation amongst medieval youth. For your statement to be any more than opinion you would need to know that the girl’s opinions weren’t considered in this decision. I suspect they were, very much.
I’m not ure why it doesn’t make sense, but that was exactly what happened. As far as can be pieced together children never worked the fields 10 hours a day as their parents did.
Cite?
Again, that isn’t even close to true. Even in medieval Europe peasant farmers only put in full days for about 3 months of the years. Sowing and harvest required work. The rest of the time was spent in light maintainence, minding livestock and so forth. Leisure time was abundant. Almost every village in France had an alehouse for example. There just isn’t anything much to do between sowing and harvest aside form the minimal maintainence tasks. Between harvest and sowing their was often nothing that could be done because it was winter. I don’t know where you get the idea that ‘The parents barely had any leisure time themselves’ but that is not true of any medieval society I know of.
‘Picking’ weeds is an ongoing mainatainece task. You can usually do about one square kilometre/day with a hoe, and it only needs to be done once a week. That’s probably 20 minutes/day.
Chopping firewood takes less than half an hour a day. Most of Europe relied on light wood/faggots that didn’t require chopping at all.
Cleaning a single room, dirt floored mud wood hut might take 2 hours/ day.
Carrying water is a chore I used to do as a child. Assuming a family of 8 needs even160 litres/day, it can be done in under an hour by a child. That’s about 20 trips with two 5 litre buckets.
Gathering food is one of those jobs that comes and goes. In berry or acorn season it might take a few hours. Most of the year there was no food to be gathered.
Milking a cow takes half an hour at the outside. Separating and making butter takes another half hour.
Taking produce to market was a rarity for most communities. Large villages and towns had one market day per month or week. Small towns had none at all: agriculture was subsistence and taxes were collected, not delivered.
Curing meats and hides was exceptionally rare. Meat was a luxury for most peasants and one beast might be slaughtered every six months. From experience two men can kill, bone and salt a steer in under 6 hours.
That’s about 8 hours/day of actual work to tend an entire family during summer and no one member was expected to do all that. During autumn and spring more work was done, during winter far less. There were other tasks like gathering firewood and so on, but they are also infrequent jobs. Outside of harvest and sowing there just wasn’t that much work to do. All accounts say that even had large amounts of leisure time. Usually they filled it productively because it is better to knot than to sit around staring into space. No TV. But there was time available.
I guess you could read the ‘Little House’ series for a reasonably accurate and easily comprehensible view of how life has been for thousands of years. These were farmers trying their hardest to produce as much as possible without any industrial assistance. Leisure time was usually avaialble for all, particularly the children even though they were expected to work. Winter was a time of tedium and excess leisure time.
