_-_WGA17622.jpg)
Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) was an early Italian Renaissance painter whose faces epitomised the humanist ideal that would become the hallmark of this creative period. Interestingly, his portrayal of a baby Christ marks the beginning of a general wane in Western art of the adult-faced infans Son of God. The knowing child-Christ, whose upraised hand signifies a wisdom that no child can possess and the foreknowledge that no man can, slowly begins to soften into the embrace of his mother and become a natural child, innocent of knowledge and the horrors of the earthly world that lie in wait.
