Smiling Madonnas and Laughing Infants

If the Middle Ages were “so dark and harsh,” why are their artists practically the only ones who know how to portray joy?

Virgin and Child, French (MET, 17.190.175) (source)

Always-Somber Saints Are a Modern Invention

I once heard a speaker claim that one of the reasons it is hard for ordinary Christian families to see themselves in the Holy Family is that all the famous paintings we see of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph always show them utterly serious, dour, and pious, without making room for smiling, laughter, and recreation.

It is an interesting claim. On the one hand, nearly 2,000 years of Christian art, Eastern and Western, concur in rarely portraying Jesus smiling, even as a child; he is, to my knowledge, never shown smiling as an adult. The Gospels never once show Jesus laughing or smiling, which led G. K. Chesterton to one theory and Umberto Eco to another.

Can we say that the entire tradition of countless thousands of images from apostolic times to the present is off-base? Gives us the wrong impression? A false spirituality? The third wave of Iconoclasm which followed in the wake of Vatican II was based on just such loose and facile reasoning. The artistic traditions of the Church are to be praised, not denigrated.

St. Teresa of Jesus was cheerful and couldn’t stand dour-faced people, that’s for sure. But she bitterly lamented the time she wasted in her youth as a frivolous and talkative religious, and spent her later years tirelessly reforming the Carmelites to make their life more strict, more ascetical, more silent, and more ordered to prayer. She would not tolerate any worldliness. To this day, I would say that healthy religious are like well-contained underground reservoirs of joy that sometimes bubble at the surface without exploding like a geyser. But you can tell that inside is to be found the reality that would express itself outwardly as smiling and laughing.

Yet there is more to the story of Christian art than seriousness. Medieval sculptors and painters had a brilliant knack for making smiling saints who do not look ridiculous or goofy. We can find Holy Family groupings where the baby Jesus is playfully pulling Joseph’s beard, and Joseph, for his part, is having a fun time of it.