Medieval and Renaissance painters had very weird ideas about babies. And it isn't like they had no practice; there must be ten thousand surviving renderings of the Madonna and Child. Hundreds showed the baby Jesus breastfeeding. Most of those paintings look like this one, by Joos van Cleve. I love Renaissance painting but I find these renderings of Jesus so ridiculous that I can hardly bear to look at them.
And then suddenly in the nineteenth century European artists decided to actually look at breastfeeding babies. Wow, they thought, they don't look like old paintings at all! How about we do a better job on this? And behold! Here is a
Madonna and Child by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. No, I never heard of him, either, but somehow despite his lack of star-quality talent he could do this simple thing better than any Renaissance genius.
Yes, I know that Renaissance artists were not trying to render Jesus as a normal baby. Their tradition told them to make him ridiculous, so they did. Nineteenth-century artists discarded that tradition, one of the ways they were actually better than what came before.
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4 comments:
"Yes, I know that Renaissance artists were trying to render Jesus as a normal baby."
Is that true? I wonder if the story is more complex and interesting. For one potential wrinkle, check out the Wikipedia article on "putto" and look at the figures in the 15th-century fresco there. These putti look more baby-like and, in my ignorant estimation, surely based on studies from life, though they're also definitely not newborns and the poses and expressions are presented as thoughtful-adult, not baby-like. In any case, I wonder if putti-drawing was a specialized skill, or maybe a skill that spread slowly.
"And then suddenly in the nineteenth century European artists decided to actually look at breastfeeding babies. Wow, they thought, they don't look like old paintings at all! How about we do a better job on this? And behold!"
Likewise, is this really how it happened? Surely there's deeper story, perhaps about how anatomists, and then artists, started looking at infants in the first few months as something one would practice drawing. I expect Jill Lepore has a book about it coming out next week.
Most artists were men. Breastfeeding was women’s work. Watching a woman breastfeed might be acceptable for a child, but not as an older person. Most women’s work is not portrayed in art… so it’s unsurprising about the awkward positioning of infants relative to the breast was shown. Even today, some men think that breasts are like juice boxes, LOL!
I *highly* recommend Waldemar Januszczak’s multi-part series “Renaissance Unchained” which was running for free on various streaming platforms awhile back. Hilarious, delightful—and I think episode 2 has the wonderful commentary on Renaissance babies.
I’m sure there’s plenty to disagree with (personally, I think that his sequel series, Rococo Unchained, was a mistake)—but so well worth a watch.
I wonder. Spinning was also women's work, and if you google Renaissance painting women spinning, you get plenty of examples of, well, Renaissance paintings showing women spinning. A nice one is Maerten van Heemskerck, Portrait of a Lady Spinning, 1531. There's also a very interesting-looking article, "A woman’s work was never done: spinning in medieval art," which has loads of examples (of spinning as women's labor, as well as cases of women using spindles to beat away animals, joust with men, etc.).
The "nursing Madonna" was actually a pretty common theme, so in a literal sense, painters and viewers were permitted to watch breastfeeding (and presumably, these images were often displayed on church walls, at least in Catholic areas). But the babies do typically look . . . off. It's not necessarily something about babies as such; again, I urge checking out Andrea Mantegna's putti! Very interesting topic as a whole.
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