Object Lesson #40

anonymous Italian,

Christ Child King,

painted wood, brass
ca. mid-19th century 

Church of St. Michael
29 Wooster Place 

There are many menageries of saints in New Haven, but one of the most extraordinary is ranked around a side altar at the Church of St. Michael on Wooster Square. Here are Trifomena and Jude, Mary Magdalene and Mauro, St. Andrew in silver, and this sculpture of the Christ Child.

Unlike most of the patrons displayed here that illustrate devotional traditions from the southern Italian regions whose emigrants made up St. Michael’s original community, this figure is from Piacenza, in the north, perhaps related to the visit of a bishop from there to New Haven in 1901.

Depictions of the infant Jesus as king are — with the widely known exception of the Infant of Prague (which receives its crown only in the 17th century) — quite rare, and are certainly not an early Christian understanding. It may be that not until the modern European states began to invent their larger scale violence did the alternative notion of power defined by innocence become an image of desire. And perhaps that is really what Maurice Sendak had in mind when he made the child Max king of the wild things.