The theme of Jesus' childhood and the interpretation that artists have given over the centuries, in an unprecedented analysis that sheds light on one of the most mysterious pages of the figure of Christ. This innovative research, through centuries of art history, demonstrates that very few artists have dared to attribute a true childhood to Jesus. Did Jesus of Nazareth really live his childhood as a child? Did he learn to stand and walk, run and fall, read and write, count and pray? Did he disobey his parents, was he corrected by his teachers or did he already know everything from birth? The canonical Gospels say nothing about it, the apocryphal texts provide imaginative and not very credible answers and the Magisterium of the Church does not pronounce itself on this subject. The painters therefore had carte blanche, especially in the West. The author analyzes them in detail and classifies their works. Some show a child who looks like a "mini adult", behaving like no other child would. Others, rarer, venture to portray Jesus as he is learning. Still others, numerous, imagine it as a normal child, but gifted, from an early age, with premonitory visions of his destiny, in particular death on the cross: in imagining behaviors typical of prophetic anticipation, they paint him while he rests lying on a cross suited to his size or in the act of blessing like a pontiff. Was religious painting induced, out of pity, to profess an innocently heretical, incomplete Christology? The desire to educate, at any price, does not always accord well with the fullness of Christ's humanity.