Why was Baby Jesus so ugly?

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A meme, or an image in a textbook, featuring the Madonna and Child. Mary, the mother of Christ, doesn’t look exactly pleased to have given virgin birth. And as you get a really good look at the baby Jesus, you think it might have something to do with just how ugly and grotesque the infant Jesus is.

Didn’t artists in the past know what a baby looks like? Did babies of the past all look like tiny old men, and not in a metaphoric way? Why does that baby have so many abdominal muscles?

Fun fact: the baby Jesus was more than likely drawn and painted that way intentionally.

The thing about Jesus is that he’s kind of a big deal to Christians, and has been for some time. The Catholic church, which was much more prominent in daily life pre-Protestants, was responsible not only for the spiritual health of its parishioners, but also for commissioning the art that would depict to a largely illiterate populace the important highlights of the Bible.

They wanted to get across the large sweeping themes found in the text of the Bible, which was often written in Latin and which wasn’t a common language of the people. (The Bible of the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t always exclusively written in Latin, but various Popes and authority figures were known to ban Biblical texts that had been translated to common languages.)

Of course, Jesus isn’t explicitly described as an old, bald man in the Bible. But he is the son of God, so it was assumed that he wouldn’t be like most other babies—that he would have been born with more wisdom and knowledge and holy insight than your run-of-the-mill ungodly baby.

So how does one show in imagery that the Son of God is smarter than his baby body would imply? Give him a weird mix of adult and baby features, of course.

Age has long been associated with wisdom (Romans intentionally aged their patriarch subjects for portraits). If you’ve reached middle age, it’s fair to assume that you’ve gained some knowledge and experience that you can impart on others.

And that’s what Jesus represented: the wisdom and guidance of God Himself. But also a baby. Innocence and wisdom in one tiny, wizened package.

Medieval and pre-Renaissance art emphasized intangible ideas like holiness and spirit, and de-emphasized worldly concerns like form and beauty. What things looked like mattered less than what things represented.

A combination of religious orthodoxy, a prohibition on idolatry, and a desire to portray the spirit of a subject rather than its physical form all lead to the nearly infinite number of ugly baby Jesus’s found in medieval and early Renaissance art (a period of time from about the 5th century to the early 14th century). It wasn’t until ideas about God’s beauty being present in this physical world crept into the zeitgeist that Jesus was painted in a manner that was more recognizably a baby. Though, to be fair, there are no known paintings of Jesus with that just-born scowl that’s commonly found on real babies.

Resources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations (this has some cool images of illuminated manuscript pages, which is not relevant to this topic, but is relevant to my life)
• https://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-babies (an interview with an actual scholar about ugly babies in art. way more informative than what i wrote, and honestly i won’t blame you if you skip to this link) 
• https://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blogs/medieval-christ-child-art.htm 
• https://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com/ (i pulled my images from this tumblr)