Why Did Old-Time Artists Paint Such Awful Babies?

Factual Questions
21

But even among the nobility, marriages didn’t tend to be that early, and even when you saw two people “marrying” at six, most of the time, that would just be a formal exchange of plight troughs, and they generally wouldn’t even live in the same house until their mid-teens,

If you look at English Royalty, here’s what you get

Richard III (age 20 years) marries Anne Neville (age 16). (def consummated immediately…she had a baby a year later) She had been married before, at 14 to Edward of the house of Lancaster (age 18)

Edward V (single, was declared illegitimate at 12, put in the tower and probably killed there that year)

Edward IV (age 22) marries Elizabeth Woodville (age 26). She had been married before, at somewhere between the ages of 18-22, to Sir John Gray, (age somewhere between 22-26)

Henry VI (age 22) marries Margaret of Anjou (age 16)

Henry V (age 33) marries Catherine de Valois (age 19)

I could go on, but the information is out there if you want to look it up. But please note, that, with the exception of Anne Neville’s first marriage, none of these people are marrying extremely early. And if you look at the records we have of marriage ages for nobility and royalty in the rennaisance, most of them got married in their late teens and early 20s. There are notable exceptions, but they’re notable because they are the exceptions.

And if you look at commoners, they married later, but not because of love…it was because they couldn’t afford to get married early. An apprentice wasn’t going to marry, and a man wouldn’t marry his daughter to an apprentice, until that apprentice stopped being an apprentice, and was able to earn his own income.

A farmer’s son wasn’t going to get married until he was able to get, either on his own, or from his father or father-in-law, a little piece of land to farm on his own. (which, btw, was why a lot of younger sons never married or took Holy Orders…they couldn’t afford to)

22

Laura Ingalls Wilder painted a rosy, nostalgic picture of farm life. For that time period, the PBS series Frontier House probably gave a more accurate picture. Even allowing for the ineptitude of the participants, farm life in the 1870’s was no walk in the park.

I work in a museum. I’ve read dozens of letters and a few diaries from early pioneer women. They’re tough-- they don’t complain all that much, but the hardships of their lives comes through loud and clear. In one family, the parents hired their 11 year old son out as a farm laborer. He worked in the morning on the parents’ farm, and then went to a neighbor’s. The mother talks about how difficult it is to get on without her son in the afternoons, but that the family needed the money badly.

Ale houses weren’t just for farmers. Tradesmen used them too.

The winter time would have afforded the most leisure time for farm families, especially for the males not involved in household chores. During this time of the year, the family would have had more time to play, but the summers had a multitude of tasks needing done.

My list of chores certainly wasn’t comprehensive. I question a few of your time estimates, and I think that if you were really taken back in time to one of these farms, you’d see that it’s a lot more work than you imagine.

23

I think we are dealing with two different artistic traditions here: the (Eastern) Byzantine and (Western) Gothic. Like yBeayf points out, the Byzantine tradition stresses the Christ Child’s fully divine and mature status by rendering him with adult-like features. This is the same tradition that Cimabue and many other 12th and 13th century Italians were working in, as medieval Italian art was strongly under the influence of Byzantine art.

During the Gothic period, babies and adults both start to take on more naturalistic proportions. This is seen in many images of the Virgin and Child (Reims cathedral, mid-13th century), obviously the most frequent subject involving an infant. Scenes of the Massacre of the Innocents (Strasbourg cathedral, early 13th-century) also represent lots of babies with babyish proportions (as well as a lot of expressive emotion; see Giovanni Pisano’s version from Pistoia. Giovanni is a good example of a medieval Italian artist who was influenced by northern Gothic art rather than Byzantine art).

(All of these examples are obviously religious in subject; I can’t think of any secular images of babies from the Middle Ages. There are plenty of naturalistic babies from classical Greek and Roman art, but that’s a different topic)

It’s really hard to find realistic images of babies in Western European art between c. 500-1200 A.D. But, then, it’s also really hard to find realistic image of adults during that time, too.

24

Skopo:“I’d like to see a cite for this. Patrons do often appear in paintings…”

No cite, it’s just what my AH professor told us, so take that how you will.

He also managed to talk for an entire class period analyzing the symbolism, genius, and cultural impact of a painting of an orange square on a white background, so his opinions and teachings might be suspect.

25

Oddly, the body ratios for children are the most often errors.
I think the head portraits are done from life and then the bodies from memory/imagination, for a misfit. Babies are not just smaller all around, but a different shape entirely, with joints at different angles, etc.

26

Ah, he sounds like a modernist. Figures.

[Note to modernist art historians: I kid, I kid. Technically speaking, I’m a modernist myself, since my primary focus is on late nineteenth-century painting (my secondary focus is on Italian Renaissance art). But I can only follow modern art with any degree of enthusiasm up to 1940 or so. After that, my interest wanes considerably.]