This Year's Uffizi Story: Representations of the Infant Jesus

I find, going back into previous years' blogs, that each time we go to the Uffizi I have picked out one or two paintings that particularly strike me for one reason or another, and do a mixture of internet research and personal observations, reactions and hypotheses about the work. In the past those paintings have included Michelangelo's tondo (round painting) "Adoration of the Magi," Fra Angelico's "Hermit Community" (it has another much longer title) and Giovanni Bellini's "Holy Allegory." They are all complex compositions and all are a little strange. Or really, more than a little in the case of the Bellini.

This year, in the first gallery of the Uffizi tour, which features particularly Giotto and Cimabue, I was struck by the naturalistic gesture of the infant Jesus in a detail from an early Renaissance "Madonna and Child" paintings. Piero Lorenzetti, of Siena, painting this in about 1340, gives us the Child reaching out to put his hand over his mother's chin, of all things. A commentary says that Pietro Lorenzetti combines the "formal solidity of Giotto's style with the flowing grace and sophisticated palette typical of Sienese painting." A lot of the compositional elements of paintings at that time were prescribed more or less by formula, but the way Pietro shows this baby reaching up to touch, or perhaps push, his mother's chin does not correspond to any formula, it's something human babies do, which Piero Lorenzetti had observed.

Thus primed, in the rooms that followed I noticed other touchingly human gestures on the part of the Infant, and collected them to show you some winning details from much larger compositions.

This is the prophet St Simeon marveling at the infant Jesus being presented to him, in a detail from "Presentation of Jesus at the Temple" by another Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1319-1348), younger brother of Piero (people did not live very long in those days). The pair of them introduced naturalism into Sienese art with their experimentation with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, foreshadowing the art of the Renaissance. In writings about the brothers, spatial illusion is emphasized as their most important contribution, but keen observation is paired with it in both brothers. Not only is there illusionistic depth of the space--the full painting includes a lot more figures than these two

-- but ... don't you love this Baby Jesus with his finger in his mouth?

Here's a detail from Bernardo Daddi's polyptych, dated "before 1338," for the Cathedral of St. Reparata, which preceded the current Duomo in Florence on the same site. It's just a sweet exchange of glances between the mother and child.

Nativity scenes and Madonna with the Child compositions have gone through many periods in which the supposed infant often has the proportions and attitudes of a somewhat chubby adult with a not exactly realistic baby face, holding up one hand in blessing. These stylized representations were in accordance with conventions of the times, emphasizing the spiritual aspects rather than physical accuracy, and these Babies were never intended to look like ordinary human babies, precisely because the Baby being represented was not an ordinary human baby but a very extraordinary one, according to those same theological conventions. However, my personal preference (since I don't live in those times, despite my understanding of why they were done as they were) is for a bit of naturalism, both anatomical and psychological.

So here's another delicious

human moment that I love, in an "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile Fabriano (painted ca. 1420), in which one of the kings is kissing the foot--the little toes-- of the Baby, and the Baby is patting him on the top of his bald head!

But this "Adoration with Shepherds and Angels" by Hugo Van Der Goes, done in 1476-1478, exemplifies the portrayal of theological over natural, and it was the dominant way to portray the Infant Jesus being adored by any group of people (or angels) for quite a long time. The paintings of the Holy Infant stretched out on a bare ground as in this picture, while being adored by Mary and Joseph and some Kings or shepherds (plus maybe a patron or two, and often an assortment of saints and angels) are all a direct consequence of a vision or dream experienced by the Swedish patron saint known variously as St Birgitta and Saint Bridget, because in her vision the players were arranged in this way.

She had been having visions, dreams and mystical experiences since childhood, but this one, during one of her several visits to Jerusalem (1360s or early 1370s? --she died in 1373, at the age of 70), was her most influential one, in the recitation of which she described how the Virgin's body, immediately after childbirth, was restored to its state prior to the immaculate conception--not swollen at all, and perfectly neat and clean--and that the Baby also was perfectly neat and clean, lying on the pavement naked and glowing. Her reports of this dream, widely circulated , led artists all over Christendom, but particularly in Italy and Northern Europe for the next century or two, to show the Baby as described in her vision, lying on the bare hard ground, naked and glowing, with admirers kneeling all around Him, in this very unnatural but newly theologically fashionable array.