By Navid Kermani, from Wonder Beyond Belief, a collection of his commentaries on Christian artwork that was published this month by Polity. This essay concerns the sculpture Christ Child (circa 1320), which is in the collection of the Bode Museum in Berlin. Kermani is a religious theorist and novelist. Translated from the German by Tony Crawford.

The boy is ugly. His mouth, for example, that open mouth; his receding lower and protruding upper jaw; and the lips more so: the lower lip short, or, more precisely, not short, but pressed, extruded into two fat bulges, accompanied by an upper…