Many old paintings (of skill and sensitivity) depict a young woman holding a nude Christ, with the baby wearing an adult-like face and making a religious hand symbol.
These depictions conflict with modern taste in a number of ways. Most obviously, no modern baby photographer gets requests for photos bearing any of the above baby characteristics. Also obviously, we tend to segregate nudity and religion. Less obviously, modern taste is not apt to put the tremendous burden of perfect saviourhood on a baby, preferring babies to be sweet and helpless, and leaving saviourhood to Superman and Perry Mason. Given that lutenists' musical literature was contemporary with these paintings, perhaps one may ask here how a modern person can understand the esthetics which produced these paintings. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
