Thanks to the internet and social media, even if you are not a big art lover, you can come across a lot of art. In a viral meme, caps, commercials…
If you often experience what I am talking about, you must have seen the works filled with baby faces that look like an old and scary man.
If you haven’t seen it yet, we are talking about such pictures;
These types of doll drawings are the kind of images you can find in almost any medieval work. Of course, it is not a coincidence that they are all drawn with a similar look.
In the Middle Ages, ‘art’ was based on religious facts and put the church at its centre.
At a time when Christianity gained strength and even expanded people’s lives and urbanization around the church, art naturally developed within the church. To put it even further, “art was for the church”.
The artworks were full of Christian elements. The topics for the artists were clear. It was clear how it should be transferred. There was an art wheel working only for the church, miles away from today’s libertarian and diverse understanding of art.
A work of art was important only if it was made for Christianity. Art was a powerful tool used to explain Christianity to the illiterate masses.
Child figures in the works represented Jesus to a large extent. Those without Jesus depictions were figures based on infant characters restricted to those existing in the Bible.
In the Christian belief, there was a belief that Jesus was born flawless, did not change as he grew up, and always remained in the same perfection. This, in turn, developed a representation in which babies look like an adult individual. Eventually, it became the common way of painting dolls.
At that time, this was considered quite normal. But seeing an adult face in a baby is just ‘spooky’ in today’s view. This begs the question; Even though they drew Jesus, why didn’t they draw faces that looked more aesthetic and realistic, but preferred distorted and scary faces?
Realistic and idealized forms were of no importance to artists at that time. The important thing was the adaptation of artistic traditions.
This resulted in not only frightening baby faces, but also highly similar human faces. The influence of concepts such as naturalism or original and realistic understandings of artworks had no effect at that time.
With the Renaissance, dolls began to ‘look like dolls’. Because with the Renaissance, the understanding of non-religious art developed and human depictions also changed.
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