Humanities Through The Middle Ages: Fill & Download for Free

I have recently discovered that there seems to be something of a widespread notion that babies in medieval paintings look “creepy.” I have never personally thought that babies in medieval paintings look particularly “creepy,” but this seems to be a notion that a lot of other people have.Even if you’re like me and you don’t think that medieval babies necessarily look “creepy,” there is no denying that babies in a lot of medieval paintings don’t exactly look like real-life babies. Instead, for the most part, they look like tiny middle-aged men. The reason why they are portrayed this way is actually extremely fascinating and has to do with the way people in the Middle Ages thought about the purpose of art.A look at some medieval babiesFirst, before we start talking about them, let’s look at some pictures of medieval babies. If you’ve never looked at babies in medieval paintings, this may come as a bit of a surprise. In any case, here they are:ABOVE: Early thirteenth-century tesselated icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula depicting the Madonna and childABOVE: Thirteenth-century tempera and gold on wood icon of the Madonna and child by the Italian painter Berlinghiero BerlinghieriABOVE: Icon of the Madonna and child painted between 1270 and 1280 by the Italian painter Meliore di JacopoABOVE: Icon of the Madonna and child painted between 1310 and 1320 by the Master of San Martino alla PalmaABOVE: Thirteenth or fourteenth-century Kretan icon of the Madonna and child, “Our Lady of Perpetual Hope”You may notice that all of the images I have just shown are images of the infant Jesus being held in the arms of his mother Mary. That is because not all babies in medieval art look like tiny middle-aged men; it’s mainly just the infant Christ who is portrayed that way and he is portrayed that way for one very complex reason.What art meant for people in the Middle AgesNow, before we talk about those baby Jesuses I just showed you, let’s talk about what “art” meant for people in the Middle Ages, because understanding the way medieval artists thought about their work is absolutely vital if you want to understand why they portrayed the infant Jesus the way they did. You see, for people in Europe during the Middle Ages, the fundamental goal of art had very little to do with realism or even necessarily aesthetics. For medieval artists, the primary goal of all art was to convey a theologically correct message.People in Europe during the Middle Ages regularly heard the gospels preached in church. Despite this, most ordinary people never actually sat down and read the gospels themselves at any point in their entire life. This was not just because the vast majority of ordinary people in the Middle Ages were illiterate, but also because books were extremely rare and expensive, because they had to be copied by hand. Therefore, most ordinary people, even if they could read, lacked the financial means to obtain their own personal copy of the gospels.On top of this, for most of the Middle Ages, in western Europe, the gospels were mainly only available in Latin translation and most ordinary people could not understand Latin. The Greek east, things were a little better, since the gospels were available in Greek, which was the language ordinary people actually spoke, but, even there, the gospels were written in a rather archaic form of Greek that most people did not use on a daily basis.ABOVE: First page of the Gospel of John from the Book of Kells, a lavishly-illustrated ninth-century copy of the four gospels in Latin. You can tell this book was clearly not the sort of thing a peasant could afford. Obviously, not all copies of the gospels were nearly this lavish, but they still tended to be well out of the price range for your average peasant.This is where art becomes important, because it was believed that ordinary people could learn about the gospels through art. Art was thought of as what you might call “the gospel of the commoners.” It was seen as a means by which the artist could educate the common folk viewing his work of art about the gospel. Obviously, educating people about theology wasn’t the only role that art was thought to play during the Middle Ages, but this was certainly an important and fundamental aspect of how people in the Middle Ages thought about art.There was a persistent belief in the Middle Ages that, if an artist represented something in a way that was not theologically correct, God would punish him for his heresy. A fragment of a lost work written by the early sixth-century AD Greek writer Theodoros Anagnostes records a miracle story about how, in around 465 AD, God supposedly punished an artist who portrayed Jesus in a manner too closely reminiscent of the Greek god Zeus for his offense by causing his arm to wither. Theodoros Anagnostes writes, as translated by Joan E. Taylor:“A certain artist painting an image of the Lord Christ lost strength in his hand, and they say that, as instructed by a certain Hellene, he’d painted the work of the image in the appearance of the name of the Saviour, but with the hairs of the head divided in two ways, so the eyes are not covered, since by forms such as this the children of Hellenes paint Zeus, in order for the observers to recognize that instead of the Saviour the adoration is to be assigned (to Zeus), being more truly curly-locked and hairy [than Christ].”Clearly, medieval artists—especially icon-painters—believed it was very important for their works of art to convey exactly the right theological message.Theological messages about the adult Jesus in medieval artThe reason why the infant Christ is shown in medieval art as looking like a miniature fully-grown man is because medieval artists were primarily trying to convey a theological point about the nature of Christ. They did this with depictions of the adult Jesus as well. For instance, here is an encaustic panel painting of Christos Pantokrator from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. It dates to around the sixth century AD. It may be the oldest surviving icon of its kind:You probably noticed something really weird about Jesus’s face in this icon. For some reason, it’s messed up; it’s asymmetrical. The left half of his face is painted different from the right half.The reason for this is because the artist who painted this icon was trying to convey a theological message about the dual nature of Christ. He was trying to illustrate through this painting that Christ is simultaneously both divine and human. Thus, one side of Jesus’s face in this painting represents his human aspect and the other side represents his divine aspect.Obviously, the artist who painted this icon did not really think that the two sides of Jesus’s actual face looked different from each other; that would be silly. Instead, the artist was using symbolism in order to represent Jesus’s spiritual and metaphysical nature, because, to medieval artists, that was what mattered more than anything else.Medieval depictions of the baby JesusMedieval artists had the exact same goal when they produced their paintings of the baby Jesus that the artist who painted the Christos Pantokrator icon from Sinai had when he painted the adult Jesus’s face. They were not trying to create realistic-looking babies and failing, but rather trying to represent a complex, theologically correct message about the fundamental nature of Christ.Now, you may be wondering what sort of message medieval artists were trying to convey by portraying the baby Jesus as looking like a tiny middle-aged man. In the Middle Ages, it was widely accepted as a dogma of the Christian faith throughout Europe that God is immutable and unchanging. Medieval Christians believed that the way God is now is the exact same way He has always been.Throughout the Middle Ages, it was also widely accepted that Jesus is one of the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity. That means medieval Christians believed that Jesus is God incarnate. Therefore, because Jesus is God and God is immutable and unchanging, medieval Christians believed that Jesus was immutable and unchanging. Medieval artists therefore sought to depict this dogma in art by portraying the infant Jesus as a homunculus, a tiny human being with the appearance of an adult.The reason why all those medieval babies look so weird, then, is because the artists who painted those babies are trying to remind you that Jesus is immutable and unchanging.The end of the creepy medieval babiesUltimately, during the Renaissance, the idea of trying to relay theological concepts through icons gradually became less prominent. Instead, as artists began paying closer attention to surviving works of Greek and Roman art, they began striving for greater realism in their works.Thus, depictions of the infant Jesus that were produced during the Renaissance are, in many cases, far more realistic than the depictions of the infant Jesus that were produced during the Middle Ages. Here are some examples of adorable Renaissance babies:ABOVE: Madonna and Child, painted in 1400 by the Italian painter Taddeo di BartoloABOVE: Madonna of the Carnation, painted between c. 1475 and c. 1478 by the Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da VinciABOVE: The Madonna of the Pinks, painted by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, probably sometime before 1507ABOVE: Madonna del Granduca, painted in 1505 by the Italian Renaissance painter RaphaelABOVE: Maria Hilf, painted c. 1530 by the Dutch Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the ElderConclusionDuring the Middle Ages, artists depicted the infant Jesus as a homunculus, a “little man,” in order to emphasize the Christian teaching that Jesus’s nature is immutable and unchanging; he was the same man as an infant that he would later be as an adult during his ministry. During the Renaissance, however, the broader artistic focus shifted away from theology and towards realism. As a result of this shift in artistic thinking, artists began to depict the infant Jesus in a more naturalistic manner, looking like a real infant.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Why Are Babies in Medieval Paintings So Creepy?” Here is a link to the full article on my website.)

No.First, the Versailles Palace is from a far younger era than the Middle Ages, and second, the Middle Ages were a surprisingly hygienic era.Bath and wine - an enjoyment even today for me!This is well explained in the Martti Vuorenjuuri’s book “Sauna kautta aikojen” (Sauna Throughout the Times). The Graeco-Roman bath culture survived through the Middle Ages, and while sauna is today understood as a Finnish item, it actually existed everywhere in the Middle Ages.a Medieval saunaThe human history is NOT progress all the time nor its direction arrow is from primitive to advanced. It is not linear. Decay, degeneration and regress do happen.The Medieval hygiene culture collapsed in the early 16th century almost overnight. The reason was twofold.The first reason was syphilis, the lethal gift of Americas, which spred through the bath water. (And many saunas were outright bordellos.)The second reason was climate change - climate turned colder, deforestation ensued, and the price of firewood made bathing too expensive anywhere except in Scandinavia and Russia.The result was the collapse of hygiene. The era of 16th to 19th centuries must have been the filthiest ever in the European history. I mean, they were incredibly filthy. Whereas bathing and swimming had been a popular pastime in the Middle Ages, people bathed now perhaps once in a year, did not wash themselves, and covered the noxious body odours by excessive use of perfumes. Also swimming skills disappeared during this era. Not even sailors bothered to learn to swim.The Versailles Palace was built during the 17th and 18th centuries, and it reflects this incredible filthiness. There was only one bathroom in the whole complex - and even that was masoned shut in error.While the Medieval castles had toilets and separate hot and cold water plumbing systms, the Baroque and Enlightment Era palaces had none. Hygiene was simply a non-issue. People shat whereever they wanted - it was the task of the servants to cleanse the do-doos. The connection between filth and diseases, which was well known in the Middle Ages, had been forgotten - the shock of the syphilis had been so great.The hygiene and bathing culture survived only in Scandinavia and Russia. The envoys of the Czar reported of the horrible stench and the incredible filth in the 17th century while visiting the Central Europe.The situation began to help only in the 19th century and the germ theory of the diseases and discovery of aseptics. Yet still Ignace Semmelweiss was martyred because of his belief in hygiene on preventing diseases.

When the blind king John of Bohemia understood that the Battle of Crecy had begun, and that his son was fighting, he asked his fellow knights to ‘bring me so far forward, that I may strike one stroke with my sword’ (from Froissart’s chronicle).So his companions tied their reins to his, and they charged four together. His son later said that he saw them charge together into the battle, and John struck more than four times with sword, fought valiantly, and all of them died together, the king with his companions round about him.‘Morte Giovanni I di Lussembergo’ (This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less.)John wasn’t a typical knight, but it underlines something critical to understanding the question: the middle ages were very different to the modern world, and there were no processes, or training, or prior qualifications, for almost any job. Specialised trades (mostly city-based artisans) had long qualification periods as an apprentice - but, other than producing a piece of master-work, not the same kind of tests we have now. Now if you wanted to become a fine leatherworker in the middle ages, eyesight would perhaps have been a problem - but not so for being a knight.Being a ‘Knight’ is not a job, or a profession. It’s an honour given to people of a certain social standing, which gives them certain obligations. That means that eyesight had little to do with it. In unusually violent periods, like the Norman Conquest, then people often rose on fighting ability - and yes, decent vision is going to help you there - but in general you were a knight because your dad was a knight. In England, for example, for much of the middle ages, anyone with an income high enough would be required to take up a knighthood, or to pay a fine instead. That does not mean they fought. It means they took up a range of social obligations, and that they gained social prestige.Plenty knights would never go to war. They would have the obligation to do so when called, certainly, or to provide a replacement, or money to hire one. So a knight with poor eyesight might hire someone else, or send their monarch money to hire a real soldier. Usually that monarch would be pretty pleased to hire a real professional, which is why mercenaries are important all through the Middle ages.But even if they did go, no-one could stop them. They could just decide, like John, that it’s better to live up to the expectations of their time and their class and fight heroically, even if they are pretty useless at it. And, after all, your eyesight has to be pretty bad to stop you walloping people over the head with a sword.‘Women hunting rabbits with a ferret’, from the Queen Mary Psalter c.1310–1320 (This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less.)Huntsmen are a little different. Again, people don’t usually have jobs in this period. A ‘huntsman’ could be just a peasant shooting rabbits for the pot, to supplement their dinner. Then, they’d use ferrets, not bow-and-arrow, so who cares about eyesight? Even then, hunting was generally reserved as a pleasure-pastime for the wealthy only - see this law from England in 1390:it is ordained that no manner of layman which hath not lands to the value of forty shillings a year shall from henceforth keep any greyhound or other dog to hunt, nor shall he use ferrets, nets, heys, harepipes nor cords, nor other engines for to take or destroy deer, hares, nor conies, nor other gentlemen's game, under pain of twelve months' imprisonment.So, generally, ‘huntsman’ is a peasant who looks after the hunting dogs and the hunting equipment for their Lord. So eyesight isn’t too critical here either!There were people for whom eyesight was a real problem in the middle ages, and they were monks and clergy, who really did have a profession that required them to read. It’s no coincidence, then, that when glasses were invented, probably in around 1290 in Northern Italy, they spread remarkably quickly and were used by better-off churchmen. In the century before that, people used ‘reading stones’, lenses, usually made from quartz, that could be used to magnify text.Early glasses in a painting of an apostle by Conrad von Soest. (This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less.)But the reality is that most people in the middle ages simply put up with trials like fading eyesight as best they could. You didn’t need eyesight in the same way we do - you didn’t need to write, or read, or drive. If you got headaches from bad eyesight, or struggled to recognise people in the street, or went blind as you got older, you just put up with it, in the same way they put up with toothache and all the other miseries of life before real medicine.