Baby person
In Medieval Byzantine iconic images of the Mother of God, the Christ child is usually depicted in a way that he looks to me like a kind of miniature adult. That is, although he is shown as tiny compared to Mary, his facial features and overall proportion are typically those of an adult, rather than an infant. I can guess at, but don’t really claim to understand, the theological or didactic significance of this mannerism—but its effect on me has always been to make these images seem creepy, offputting, and surreal.
Now that I have an infant child of my own, however, and have spent some time holding her, I can perceive that there’s a sense in which these images can be viewed as plainly naturalistic. From time to time, when I’m looking at Lucy’s face, all the obvious babyishness of it seems to melt away for a moment and I’m just—I don’t quite know how to put it—just looking at someone, at this complete human being that I know. I don’t picture some imagined adult version of her face at these moments; her appearance is still basically the same, but my sense of the significance of that appearance somehow shifts away from sentimental notions of infantile adorableness (and I think my notion of babyhood includes an “unfinished” quality) to a more clear-sighted and regular human love, in which Lucy appears perfect and complete already, rather than a being in potential.
I don’t know that I’ve described the experience very well, but anyway it helps those icons make a lot more sense to me.
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