Elatia explains:
The Warburg Method teaches us that devotional art is not only not always beautiful, but rarely beautiful -- because it is deeply coded and the untutored eye doesn't always get it. Is not intended to get it. This is true across civilizations, not just true in the Western painting tradition.
As the blogger knows, his stock represents about 400 years of devotional painting, in the Byzantine as well as Western traditions. This is interesting not because it makes his blog title inaccurate but because it's a crash course in how observation-based painting changes things, and in how it doesn't.
Does it matter if the painter is going for naturalism? This is something no Byzantine painter ever heard of doing. A Virgin enthroned on a huge wall 30 feet up from where the viewer stands is not meant to look like a sweet British mom wondering at the miracle of her rosy child. The heavy dark lines describing the faces are meant to suggest modeling and somberness from a great distance, in candlelight. The wall painter of any era knows -- the image must read. If you look at what the painter has done up close, in a book or in a photo blog, you miss that point and see only a coarse, hirsute appearance, one that seems inexplicable and uglified. The somberness and linear quality of Byzantine images is present in hand held icons too, but these are more delicately painted. What you will never see is a Byzantine genre scene -- painting was for depicting holiness. To be holy is to be set apart, and to look it. If you notice, the Buddha is never represented as a conventionally handsome South Asian man -- other stuff is going on in those representations, as it is in the way Byzantine painters represented holy men, women and babies.
There are eras in painting where you would find only Madonna and Child images that speak of what an agonizing fate it is, to be the Son of God, and how grave and sorrowful His mother must be. There are other eras wherein the cult of the Holy Infant took a different turn, the art focusing on the deep joys of Christianity, on the life the Christian is given that is as new and as disburdened as an infant's life. Virgin and child are emblematic of perfect trust, even in the presence of great foreboding. If, as a painter, you mean The Awful never to be very far away, you will have your ways of demonstrating that. Christ is not "a guy like you," and the most strangely powerful images of Christ are intended to show the viewer the aspect of Christ that he can empathize with -- the Christ who is set apart, and bears about himself even in infancy the traces of an unendurable but splendidly meaningful life. What woman can be sadder than the Madonna, yet more convinced of her unique significance? Should she not occasionally look the part? A huge if not often explicated purpose of devotional art is to give courage to the devotee; images of extreme conventionality may fail in this aim.
Well, I am NOT an authority, only a lifelong student and reader, with a (very) distant degree in Art History. But! The observation of children _as_ children, not as trainee adults who need to be fit to enter the labor force ASAP, is a moder...n phenomenon, in art and in literature. With that shift in focus comes all kinds of romanticizing: the savage, the angel, the superb victim, the young hero, and so on, with many of these categories overlapping or morphing into one another. Restricting myself to art, I want to point out that observation based painting and drawing is modern, as in Renaissance and Post-Ren., the Greeks and Romans being another subject. It was against Church and other laws to learn anatomy via dissection, and even Michelangelo risked much when he learned anatomy from corpses, so this left the art of the Middle Ages, and Byzantine art, as well as the art of the Early Renaissance, at a certain powerful disadvantage, IF good art is supposed to look like what you see with your eyes, not your inner eye. An important part of learning about art, of having the full experience of art, is to allow your own inner eye to magnify what is deep and true in many forms of expression, over many stylistic conventions. I am not the world's biggest fan of Byzantine holy images, for instance, but not liking them on the grounds of their being stylized, static, and a failure at resembling human beings is like thinking Haiku might be better if it were longer. And, yes! In any era, if an artist needed to take a wife away from her labors to "sit in" for a missing Madonna, or to borrow a toddler for John the Baptist or an infant for Christ, you may be sure it was over very quickly!
Wow, thank you, Ruchira! AB yields to a plea to take ugly Renaissance babies seriously! XOXOXO
Posted by: Elatia Harris | December 03, 2011 at 01:25 PM
This is something no Byzantine painter ever heard of doing. A Virgin enthroned on a huge wall 30 feet up from where the viewer stands is not meant to look like a sweet British mom wondering at the miracle of her rosy child. The heavy dark lines describing the faces are meant to suggest modeling and somberness from a great distance, in candlelight.
This reminds me of the Greek Orthodox Church I used to go to. The image that you're referring to here is called the Platytera, if I remember correctly, and in that particular church, one of the priests once observed that Mary's raised hand was so close to the Christ child's face that it looked like she was going to slap him! *laughing*
Posted by: Naveeda | December 03, 2011 at 03:05 PM
Wonderful Elatia!! I am a huge fan of Pamuk's My Name is Red as it also tells the story of a different understanding and approach to art--beyond the representational. It is a wonderful book if you haven't read it, Elatia, I think you would love it.
Su Shi, when writing about Chinese painting, also said something illuminating about how, while even a child could produce a work of realistic likeness, that only a true scholar and a gentleman was able to create art of moral value; so that even from within the confines of the city the viewer could be utterly transported. Su Shi praised this kind of art that could induce a state which could put the viewer in touch with the simplicity of nature-- or in his words: with the dao. Don't quote me on ay of this--since all my books are back in japan but didn't Heidegger also write that if a work of art is "working" it will illuminate all kinds of meaning and light up for the viewer an understanding of being (so when that Medieval cathedrals were like "encyclopedias of stone" for a Medieval believer--while for us maybe they are just formally beautiful? This is not unlike what is going on with the babies, except maybe they don't even show up to modern viewers as beautiful?) Enjoyed!!
Posted by: Peony | December 03, 2011 at 03:15 PM
I wonder if some of the baby Jesus faces were infantilized reflection of adult patrons who commissioned the images, just like the one in the photo that you have included, even though the comparison there is with a photo of a 20th/21st century adult.
I looked on the web for baby Krishna images, just for comparison's sake and found a bunch of suitably charming infants in blue, all of which post-date the Victorian period. Any earlier representations of the infant Krishna looked more adult-like, even in dimensions compared with other figures in the pictures.
Posted by: Sujatha | December 03, 2011 at 08:05 PM
This won't be aesthetic or intellectual, but I am reminded of an old BBC joke. A BBC reporter was going to interview the last Hansom cab driver in London, and ask why the others are so ugly. Do I hear a groan, out there?
One of my fellow grad students, majoring in developmental psychology, told me that the depiction of babies/children in pre-ren paintings as little adults, was indicative of psychological immaturity, and egotism on the part of the artists. They lacked the appropriate, mature psychological perspective to see children as anything other than smaller models of themselves.
I guess I sort of believed her at the time, yet, I could not imagine an artist not being able to discern such important distinctions in form among his or her study subjects.
I was at a meeting on Saturday evening for a couple of hours. When I returned home I read the original post that preceded this one on AB. I was thinking as I read that we have a usual and frequent visitor to this blog who could enlighten us all on this subject, and answer the question, "Why are these babies so ugly?" Well, I hadn't refreshed this page for many hours. When I did, Voila! Now we know.
Posted by: Norman Costa | December 04, 2011 at 12:57 AM
Very interesting, Elatia. Thanks!
Posted by: Usha | December 04, 2011 at 01:32 AM
I can't accept the assumption that during the Renaissance viewers of paintings of babies were interested fundamentally in comparing them to real-life cognates, as if the cause of their pleasure or illumination were in reverse engineering the work of the artist. That seems to me to be a modern concern. See again the wonderful SNL skit from the very early days featuring Dan Aykroyd as the lascivious art critic, E. Buzz Miller, who these days would host a Hot Babes of the Renaissance web site.
Springing from Elatia's informative comments, take a peak at these remarks by Leo Steinberg, from his book-length article in October (a journal), "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion."
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | December 04, 2011 at 07:07 PM
Everyone, thanks so much for reading! This afternoon I tried to write a reply in detail but it was gobbled up. Testing!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | December 04, 2011 at 08:32 PM
It is indeed strange Elatia that A.B. is eating up your comments. Others have written longish comments on the post. Dean's is in fact replete with references to Christ. So what is happening to yours? I would hate to see you "blocked" for no discernible reason. The funny thing was that I could post my own comments but couldn't copy and paste yours! I guess A.B. wants you to be a regular "author" here and not just a commenter!
Posted by: Ruchira | December 04, 2011 at 11:23 PM
@ Those frustrated by non-publishing of comments:
I have had the same problem, intermittently. There was nothing obviously amiss with the content of the reply or post. After many unsuccessful attempts to re-post or diagnose the problem I hit upon a couple of ways to get around the problem.
1. Copy the content into a pure text processor (no special formatting, etc.) like NotePad in Windows. Then copy it directly into AB from NotePad.
2. Break up the content into two pieces and make the reply/post a part 1 and part 2. Do this even though AB should be able to handle the length or your original.
3. Before pasting into AB, refresh your page/screen.
I have had a problem in the past with non-printing characters (you can't see them but they are there) that cause problems. They tend to be characters that start or finish a command, or AB thinks a command was started or finished. The problem may have to do with the fact that (transparent to you) different implementations of UNICODE and WESTERN character sets may not map properly or have 'sticky' characters that are brought along to AB.
4. Don't forget to do number 3.
Posted by: Norman Costa | December 05, 2011 at 01:49 AM
Thanks for the pointers, Norman.
I thought I had figured out most of the quirks that A.B. displays from time to time. But in trying to help Elatia get her comment out there, I failed. I tried your suggestion #1 in order to erase whatever conflicting HTML code may have been embedded in the original. But that did not work either. #3 must have happened because after each failed attempt and reposting, the page was refreshed. In the end I got Elatia's permission to just publish it as a post, a better option for sure.
I am going to send you the text of that comment which is essentially the same as the body of that post. It came originally from Elatia's Facebook page where I had put the link to the "Ugly Babies" link. Please see if you can post it in the comments section of this post where Elatia and I were trying to publish it. If you are successful, please leave it there. I will delete it when I see it.
Posted by: Ruchira | December 05, 2011 at 09:00 AM
I just copied and pasted the text of this post as a comment on the former. Seems to have worked.
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | December 05, 2011 at 10:56 AM
Dean, you copied the post here. I am assuming that whatever conflicting factors were preventing me and Elatia from posting got sorted out by TypePad in this format. I am sending you and Norm the text copied from Facebook where Elatia first wrote it. See if that shows up.
Posted by: Ruchira | December 05, 2011 at 11:28 AM
@ Ruchira, Elatia, Dean:
So the only fix I see, without doing what Dean did is to make sure you hit ENTER after pasting text.
However, if the problems begins anew, I suggest Ruchira delete the immediately preceding comment and re-post the missing text. If still a problem, then delete the earlier posts, one by one. The point is that there may be non-printing characters in prior posts that are causing problems.
Otherwise, it beats the hell out of me what is going on or why the ENTER fix works. In programmer speak we refer to a fix we can't explain as FM (F*****G Magic.)
Posted by: Norman Costa | December 05, 2011 at 04:20 PM
All this over something I wrote! I'm so flattered...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | December 05, 2011 at 04:53 PM
As I said to Norm and Dean, the Twilight Zone of appearing and disappearing comments was either a ghostly phenomenon or the Curse of the Ugly Dead Babies.
Posted by: Ruchira | December 05, 2011 at 05:54 PM
At least I have discovered it's not something specific to my computer...(famous last words)
Posted by: Elatia Harris | December 05, 2011 at 09:49 PM