Infant

Infant is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Paolo Veronese, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Jean Honoré Fragonard.

In everyday usage a baby is the very young offspring of human beings, while "infant"—from the Latin īnfāns, "unspeaking"—is the formal synonym, the same root that gives us "infantry." Yet as a subject in art the infant has rarely been a neutral observation from life. For most of Western history the painted infant was first of all a sacred one: the Christ Child of the Madonna and Child, a theme that crystallised after the Council of Ephesus proclaimed Mary "Mother of God" (Theotokos) in 431 CE. Early Byzantine icons rendered the pair symbolically rather than naturalistically—frontal, gold-grounded, the child a small dignitary rather than a baby—setting a template that endured for centuries.

Medieval painters famously made their infants look like shrunken adults, with receding hairlines and grave, grown faces. This was less incompetence than theology: under the so-called homunculus idea, Christ was held to be born "perfectly formed and unchanged," and because Jesus was the most frequently depicted infant, his middle-aged features spread to babies generally. Childhood itself was scarcely conceived of as a distinct state before the twelfth century.

Naturalism returned through Italy. In the late thirteenth century Cimabue and Duccio di Buoninsegna softened the Byzantine formula, Duccio giving his Christ Child lifelike weight and tender contact with his mother. Alongside the holy infant ran the putto—the chubby, often winged nude child revived by the sculptor Donatello in the 1420s from Greco-Roman erotes on ancient sarcophagi. By the High Renaissance the type was ubiquitous; the two daydreaming cherubs at the foot of Raphael's Sistine Madonna (1513–14) remain the most reproduced infants in Western art.

The Enlightenment transformed the secular infant. Rousseau's Emile (1762) argued that children are born innocent, not sinful, and portraitists answered with tender, individualised babies. Family and domestic scenes multiplied: Charles Le Brun's group portrait Everhard Jabach and His Family, Dutch genre intimacies such as Nicolaes Maes's The Lacemaker, François Boucher's Washerwomen, and—in the young United States—Ralph Earl's plain-spoken likenesses Mrs. Noah Smith and Her Children and Lady Williams and Child, alongside Lilly Martin Spencer's affectionate Conversation Piece. From sacred icon to sentimental family record, the infant became one of art's enduring measures of how each age imagined human beginnings.