The child to be protected: coral and amulets in Renaissance painting

In almost every culture the small child is considered the evil eye's favourite target. Its beauty, its fragility and the affection it arouses attract intense gazes, and every intense gaze could, according to the belief, turn into harm. For this reason families surrounded their children with protections. A particularly interesting case concerns coral, which travelled from antiquity all the way into the religious painting of the Italian Renaissance, leaving traces in some masterpieces.

Ancient roots

Pliny the Elder, in the thirty-second book of the Natural History, writes that sprigs of coral hung around children's necks were believed to protect them. Coral was precious, red like blood and life, and surrounded by a mythical aura: Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells of its origin from seaweed turned to stone by contact with Medusa's head. Its transforming power was thus linked to a gaze able to kill, turned around into a defence.

Alongside coral, Roman children wore the bulla and small phallic amulets, while in later ages pouches with relics or holy images, red ribbons, little bells and animal teeth became widespread. The continuity is remarkable: materials and religious justifications change, but the idea remains that childhood must be protected from invisible influences as well as from the concrete dangers of everyday life.

The Christ Child with coral

In fifteenth-century Italian painting one sometimes sees the Christ Child with a sprig of coral around his neck or a necklace of red beads. One of the most famous examples is Piero della Francesca's Brera Altarpiece, now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, in which the Child asleep on his Mother's lap wears a coral pendant around his neck. The same painter takes up the motif in the Senigallia Madonna, kept in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino.

In these works coral has a double meaning. On the one hand it reflects a real custom of families of the time, who placed sprigs of coral around their children's necks; on the other, in the sacred context, the red of the coral has been read by art historians as an allusion to the blood of the Passion and to Christ's future sacrifice. Painting thus takes up a popular protective practice and charges it with theological meaning.

From cradles to red ribbons

In Southern Italy and in many other European regions the habit of protecting newborns with the colour red survived for a long time. Red ribbons tied to cradles and prams, small coral horns pinned to clothes, holy medals sewn into swaddling bands were documented by ethnographers well into the twentieth century. These objects were often given by relatives and godparents, and the gift itself carried the value of a good wish and of a bond between families.

Following the history of children's amulets allows us to grasp a deeply human side of the belief in the evil eye. Behind sprigs of coral and red ribbons lies above all the fear of losing what one loves most, in ages when infant mortality was extremely high. Renaissance painting, with its children adorned with coral, has preserved this anxious tenderness for us.