Renaissance Beautiful Babies

 Renaissance Artists Realized Children Were Not Ugly

 Renaissance art brought realistic depictions of children. Just 200 years earlier, artists were creating rather ugly grown man-like children. But by the fifteenth century, Renaissance artists were painting realistic children with beautiful features. In the sixteenth century, artists were painting almost too-cute cheruby children, such as those famous flying baby angels and the Madonna by Raphael. The misshapen ugly tots of the pre-renaissance period were but a distant memory.

This painting from Raphael shows the Madonna sitting serenely in front of a dark landscape, and the Christ child lovingly grasping her neck. The two radiate warmth and peace. The people are painted realistically, and unlike earlier works, they show dimension and true proportion. 

Buoninsegna Christ Child Ornament by antiqueart
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Pre-Renaissance Artists Painted Ugly Children

Strange Little Pre-Renaissance Children!

Duccio di Buoninsegna Madonna and Child

Before the 1400s, artists didn't do cute children. They did strange little man-like children. See our example of Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child. Could it be that the gene pool actually created children that ugly back then?

Not quite. Actually, there are a couple of academic discussions as to why this era of artists created ugly children:

• People didn't think of children as anything but miniature adults, and that's how the artists depicted them.
• Early artists may not have grasped the concept that adults and children had different proportions.
• Have you ever tried to keep a child seated long enough to draw even his face? Rather than make a child sit for very long, artists may have just used the proportions they were used to painting, and that would have been the proportions of adults.
• Just about all the children painted were of the Christ child. The artists may have created the man-like Christ on purpose to show that Christ was wise beyond his years.

Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, Sienese, 1255-1319). Madonna and Child

Duccio di Buoninsegna painted lots and lots of these Madonna and Child portraits -- all of them just about carbon copies of each other. Here's one that showcases a pre-Renaissance Christ child. While the image is quite appealing if you're going for stylistic and graphic, if the artist was striving for realism, he failed miserably. This is a very unproportional child... small head, skinny, and he's balding just like an old man, but ... it's a baby...

Buoninsegna Christ Child Ornament by antiqueart
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Vintage palm reading hand map - the language of palmistry

We're proud to announce that our product shown below, a vintage palm reading map, received the Zazzle Best Design award in 2012. 

This palm reading guide is a vintage map of the hand -- it's for fortune tellers who look at the lines in your hand and tell you your future. This palm map is actually an image from an antique book from 1902 called "Popular Amusements for Indoors and out of doors." The section is called "The Language of the Hand and what it reveals". It says, "Palmistry is divided into two technical sciences, known as chirognomy and chiromancy. Chirognomy is the science of determining individual traits and hereditary tendencies by studying the shape and pose of the hand. Chiromancy is the science of determining the acquired characteristics of a person, foretelling events, etc, by the study of the lines and markings to be found in the palm of the hand."

Vintage palm reading palmistry Hand Map Beverage Coasters

A palmistry practitioner reads palms. Those Victorians were very clever illustrators. This is a vintage palm reading scientific illustration for Victorians parlor games. The map of the hand is the real deal -- from the Mount of Venus to will, logic, love, sympathy, to resistance, courage, and the plain of mars with is apparently temper. Everything you wanted to know about yourself can be told in the palm of your hand.