Ugly Babies

Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men

This weird image isn’t in one painting but hundreds. For some reason, it took
artists thousands of years to figure out what children look like. Hundreds of
positively gorgeous scenes, with beautiful adult subjects and precise
perspective, have been marred by puzzlingly ugly children. Not just ugly, but
hideous, like little pint-size Steve Buscemi’s without the charm.

Ugly babies are such a common phenomenon that it has its own dedicated
Tumblr, coffee-table books, and scholarly studies attempting to find the cause.
One theory suggests that because Christian churches commissioned most
paintings, their child subjects were all modeled after the baby Christ, who was
born perfectly formed and unchanged. That would make him look like a tiny
adult man, a DeVito if you will, and hence the baby’s ugliness. Whether this
“homuncular Jesus” theory is right or not, it’s hard to explain away just how
grotesque these little monsters were.