Why Are Babies Scary Drawn in Medieval Paintings?

Thanks to the internet and social media, even if you are not a big art lover, you can come across a lot of art. In a viral meme, caps, commercials…

If you often experience what I am talking about, with baby faces that look like a scary old man You must have seen the full works.

If you haven’t seen it yet, we are talking about such pictures;

This kind of baby drawings, in almost all medieval works the kind of images you might encounter. Of course, it is not a coincidence that they are all drawn with a similar look.

In the Middle Ages, ‘art’ was based on religious facts and put the church at its centre.

At a time when Christianity gained strength and even expanded people’s lives and urbanization around the church, art naturally developed within the church. To take it even further, “art was for the church”.

The artworks were full of Christian elements. The topics for the artists were clear. It was clear how it should be transferred. Miles away from today’s libertarian and diverse understanding of art, working only for the church. art wheel there was.

A work of art was important only if it was made for Christianity. Art was a powerful tool used to explain Christianity to the illiterate masses.

Child figures in the works represented Jesus to a large extent. Those without Jesus depictions were figures based on infant characters restricted to those existing in the Bible.

In the Christian belief, Jesus was born perfect, It does not change as it grows and always remains the same perfection. There was such a belief. This, in turn, developed a representation in which babies look like an adult individual. Eventually, it became the common way of painting dolls.

At that time, this was considered quite normal. However, seeing an adult face in a baby is only ‘eerie’. This begs the question; Even if they draw Jesus, why more aesthetic and realistic looking faces They didn’t draw but preferred distorted and scary faces?

Realistic and idealized forms were of no importance to artists at that time. The important thing was the adaptation of artistic traditions.

So not just spooky baby faces, largely similar human faces also appeared. The influence of concepts such as naturalism or original and realistic understandings of artworks had no effect at that time.

With the Renaissance, dolls began to ‘look like dolls’. Because with the Renaissance, the understanding of non-religious art developed and human depictions also changed.

For more art basket content;