Child portraits. Representations of the child body in children’s illustration and literature: some interpretative categories.
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of History of Education (RSE)
Marcella Terrusi
The history of children’s illustration and literature has always offered images of childhood in which different children’s figures emerge from the folds of the story with the strength of a visual representation that gives scholars different eyes for interpret-ing the underlying symbolic universe. The rich heritage found in the best works of children’s illustrated literature offers an ideal opportunity for deciphering the depth of childhood metaphors. Children’s literature, or invisible literature (Beseghi e Grilli 2011) while increasingly less invisible as new contributions enrich its critical study, invites us to observe the children’s world in all its intricate details, in the figures that render its fundamental “otherness” (Bernardi 2016) compared to the adult world, in all its complexity and wealth. Antonio Faeti’s 1972 essay Guardare le figure (Looking at Figures) marked the start of a new hermeneutic season for the history of children’s illustration (Faeti 2011). History of children’s illustration and literature presents some portraits of childhood which carry not only the mark of the artist’s vision of childhood and education, but also its imagined version of the child body (Contini e Demozzi 2016), the freedom of expression, its communicative and expressive statute. As this essay sets out to do, an illustrated children’s portrait gallery can thus offer a possible reconnaissance of ways of looking at child figures, children’s bodies, their relationship with space, movement, clothing, self-awareness and other narrative and pedagogical elements (Farnè 2016).
Filtered through some critical proposals, the iconography of the child body becomes an opportunity to rethink the tale of childhood in books and its position in the collective imagination: a tangible, visible, bodily position, which often plays on the opposites of idealisation and monstrification, with all their infinite intermediate shades. In this sense the constellation of classics also shows us constants, recurrences and relation-ships between children illustrated in different periods, as if, in the discourses on the form of children, there were as many lines of thinking on their existential possibilities.As we know, the illustrated representation of children’s bodies is a relatively recent phenomenon in the visual arts, a phenomenon that enjoyed an initial season of extraordinary ferment in the Victorian era when, as one might say in a clichéd yet not totally false manner, the bourgeoisie invented childhood, and above all, this is certain, invented children’s books and stories, illustrated right from the start by artists.Children’s illustration in the 19th century invented picturebooks for children books created and printed to be purchased by adults, but designed and illustrated with the main purpose of entertaining and enthralling children with short stories, illustrated with rich pictures and often with stories in rhyme. The outcome of the new-founded children’s publishing of the time, the work of printers and artists of the calibre of Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, Edward Lear, differed in the proposed styles, forms and narrations; perhaps we can also state that if Victorian children’s illustrated literature shares a common trait, this is indeed its intrinsic con-tradiction and the often paradoxical timbre that marks the variegated set of narrative and figurative inventions of the time (Meyer 1983). Often this literature brought a new sensitivity and truth, anticipating the many subversive elements of the history of childhood that was to come. In the study of these works, critical attention and the production of systematic specific research is rather recent, in any case in the past four decades. In Italy, the milestones of this study are certainly Paola Pallottino’s Storia dell’illustrazione italiana (A history of Italian illustration), the aforementioned essay by Faeti, reprinted in 2011, and other contributions which from 2012 on spe-cifically focused on the unique form and perspectives of picturebooks (Terrusi 2012; Hamelin 2012; Campagnaro e Dallari 2013). In the years between these dates, some important international contributions to the study of illustrated books were pub-lished in both the English and French speaking worlds which constitute the main bibliographical references for the historical and pedagogical study of children’s illustrated literature, which in the meantime has been further enriched by other works that increasingly capture and explain pedagogical complexity through the language of pictures and iconotext, considered in the counterpoint of “the relationship be-tween image and text” (Nikolajeva e Scott, 29). This figurative and narrative production on one hand finds its inspiration in the collective imagination and its icons, while on the other demonstrates the educational projections which correspond to specific historical moments — as it refers to the childhood universe, it underlines its own constituent otherness.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rse-9341
Read Full Text: https://rivistadistoriadelleducazione.it/index.php/rse/article/view/9341
