A History of the Infant Christ Being Given Piggy-Back Rides in Western Art

It’s a lovely motif, although I’m sure I’ve only been especially drawn to it lately on account of having a baby of my own. He’s not really big enough for piggy-back rides yet, having only recently mastered sitting upright, but I’m looking forward to hauling him around in that particular fashion pretty soon.

What a demeanor! The round placidity of the face, the calm expectation of being fed minute bits of debris from a room-temperature slice of potato, the hands patient in the security of future smearing — he looks like a beautiful Charles Laughton.

The motif in question, of the Christ-child being hauled across a river, comes from the legend of St. Christopher, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. After his conversion, Christopher (often depicted as a giant) spent his life ferrying passengers across a turbulent river; one day a child asked for passage, and with each step grew heavier and heavier, until they reached the other side in safety and he revealed that he was the Christ, and carried with him the weight of the world. Our baby is, like all babies, shocking heavy for something that weighs less than twenty-five pounds; I can easily believe it.

Images and legends of the Christ-child (covering the vacant period in the Gospels between his nativity and the disputation in the temple at twelve) really took off in late antiquity, and are often quite charming. Many of those legends suggest a separate, ongoing version of the Christ-Child who exists independently of the grown Christ and has his own life to live, with his own concerns and goals in the world. Like Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, many people like the Christmas Jesus best.

It’s sweet, too, to see a sentiment like “They grow up so fast — I wish they could stay babies a little longer” so many parents feel toward their own children applied to God. The Christ-Child stories imply a collective Christian desire for God not to be God just yet, or at least for all of the attributes of God not yet to be fully and evenly distributed throughout the Incarnation.

A baby as heavy as God, who talks like a grown man and a learned one at that, but who still needs to use water-wings at the pool; a God who still needs me to pick him up so he doesn’t get his feet wet, that’s the God for me.