Week 10: Mar. 10, 2024

The Virgin and Child, France, ca. 1475, Limestone with traces of polychrome (left); and The Virgin and Child in Glory, France (Isle-de-France), 1400-1425, Sandstone with traces of paint (right)

Mother and child…

These two statues stood out among the multiple rooms of Christian art because of the warm and smiling faces of the Virgin mother. They were among the few in this collection that showed a mother/child relationship that felt similar to a modern and non-holy mother and child representation. In the first, she holds the child’s foot in her hand as he reaches up to touch her face. In the second, the mother smiles at the child as he playfully holds a bird. Representations of the Virgin and Child often show the mother’s eyes averted to the side or downcast. There are others that show the eye contact, love and tenderness, but these two seemed so interactive and even playful. Yet they are both nearly 600 years old.

On another note, I continue to wonder when I see centuries old art about the inability or unwillingness to represent a baby in the actual proportions of an infant, toddler, or young child. So often they appear to be a miniature adult. The sculpture on the left shows this more dramatically than the other. The proportions of the head to the body and arms is adult-like rather than child-like. The facial features show the same non-childlike structures. When this oversight is in contrast to the obvious skill in acurately representing the human form, whether in painting or in sculpture, it makes me curious as to why the choice was made so consistently in older artwork. Theoretically, ‘childhood’ was conceptualized much differently, but artistically, I would expect that it could be observed and represented more realistically if the artist had wanted to.