Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it. It is hard to believe that this neglect was due to incompetence or incapacity; it seems more probable that there was no place for childhood in the medieval world. An Ottonian miniature of die twelfth century provides us with a striking example of the deformation which an artist at that time would inflict on children's bodies. The subject is the scene in the Gospels in which Jesus asks that little children be allowed to come to Him. The Latin text is clear: parvuli. Yet the miniaturist has grouped around Jesus what are obviously eight men, without any of the characteristics of childhood; they have simply been depicted on a smaller scale. in a French miniature of the late eleventh century the three children brought to life by St Nicholas are also reduced to a smaller scale than the adults, Without any other difference in expression or features. A painter would not even hesitate to give the naked body of a child, in the very few cases when it was exposed, the musculature of an adult: thus in a Psalter dating from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, Ishmael, shortly after birth, has the abdominal and pectoral muscles of a man. The thirteenth century, although it showed more understanding in its presentation of childhood, remained faithful to this method. In St Louis's moralizing Bible, children are depicted more often, but they are still indicated only by their size. In an episode in the life of Jacob, Isaac is shown sitting between his two wives, surrounded by some fifteen little men. who come up to the level of the grown-ups' waists: these are their children. When Job is rewarded for his faith and becomes rich once more, the illuminator depicts his good fortune by placing job between an equal number of cattle on the left and children on the right: the traditional picture of fecundity inseparable from wealth. In another illustration in the Book of Job, some children are lined up in order of size.
In the thirteenth-century Gospel-book of the Sainte-Chapelle, in an illustration of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Christ and one of the Apostles are shown standing on either side of a little man who comes up to their waists: no doubt the child who carried the fishes. In the world of Romanesque formulas, right up to the end of the thirteenth century, there are no children characterized by a special expression but only men on a reduced scale. This refusal to accept child morphology in art is to be found too in most of the ancient civilizations. A fine Sardinian bronze of the ninth century B.C. shows a sort of Pieta: a mother holding in her arms the somewhat bulky body of her son. The catalogue tens us: 'The little masculine figure could also be a child which, in accordance with the formula adopted in ancient times by other peoples, had been represented as an adult.' Everything in fact would seem to suggest that the realistic representation of children or the idealization of childhood, its grace and rounded charms, was 'confined to Greek art. Little Eroses proliferated in the Hellenistic period, but childhood disappeared from iconography together with the other Hellenistic themes, and Romanesque art returned to that rejection of the special features of childhood which had already characterized the periods of antiquity before Hellenism. This is no mere coincidence. Our starting-point in this study is a world of pictorial representation in which childhood is unknown; literary historians such as Mgr Calve have made the same observation about the epic, in which child prodigies behave with the courage and physical strength of doughty warriors. This undoubtedly means that the men of the tenth and eleventh centuries did not dwell on the image of childhood, and that that image had neither interest nor even reality for them. It suggests too that in the realm of real life, and not simply in that of aesthetic transposition, childhood was a period of transition which passed quickly and which was just as quickly forgotten.
Such is our starting-point. How do we get from there to the little imps of Versailles, to the photographs of children of all ages in our family albums?
About the thirteenth century, a few types of children are to be found which appear to be a little closer to the modem concept of childhood. There is the angel, depicted in the guise of a very young man, a young adolescent: a clergeon, as Pere du Colombier remarks. But how old is this 'little clerk'? The clergeons were children of various ages who were trained to make the responses in church and who were destined for holy orders, seminarists of a sort in a period when there were no seminaries and when schooling in Latin, the only kind of schooling that existed, was reserved for future clerks. 'Here', says one of the Miracles de Notre-Dame, 'there were little children who had few letters and would rather have fed at their mother's breast [but children were weaned very late at that time: Shakespeare's Juliet was still being breast-fed at three] than do divine service. The angel of Reims, to take one example, is a big boy rather than a child, but the artists have stressed the round, pretty, and somewhat effeminate features of youths barely out of childhood. We have already come a long way from the small-scale adults of the Ottonian miniature. This type of adolescent angel was to become extremely common in the fourteenth century and was to last to the very end of the Italian Quattrocento: the angels of Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Ghirlandajo all belong to it.
The second type of child was to be the model and ancestor of all the little children in the history of art: the Infant Jesus, or the Infant Notre-Dame, for here childhood is linked to the mystery of motherhood and the Marian cult. To begin with, Jesus, like other children, is an adult on a reduced scale: a little God-priest in His majesty, depicted by Theotokos. The evolution towards a more realistic and more sentimental representation of childhood begins very early on in painting: in a miniature of the second half of the twelfth century, Jesus is shown wearing a thin, almost transparent shift and standing with His arms round His mother's neck, nestling against her, cheek to cheek. With the Virgin's motherhood, childhood enters the world of pictorial representation. In the thirteenth century it inspires other family scenes. In St Louis's moralizing Bible, there are various family scenes in which parents are shown surrounded by their children with the same tender respect as on the rood-screen at Chartres: thus in a picture of Moses and his family, husband and wife are holding hands while the children (little men) surrounding them are stretching out their hands towards their mother. These cases, however, remained rare: the touching idea of childhood remained limited to the Infant Jesus until the fourteenth century, when, as is well known, Italian art was to help to spread and develop it.
A third type of child appeared in the Gothic period: the naked child. The Infant Jesus was scarcely ever depicted naked. More often than not, like other children of His age, He was chastely wrapped in swaddling-clothes or clad in a shift or a dress. He would not be undressed until the end of the Middle Ages. Those few miniatures in the moralizing Bibles which depicted children showed them fully dressed, except in the case of the innocents or the dead children whose mothers Solomon was judging. It was the allegory of death and the soul which was to introduce into the world of forms the picture of childish nudity. Already in the pre-Byzantine iconography of the fifth century, in which many features of the future Romanesque art made their appearance, the bodies of the dead were reduced in scale. Corpses were smaller than living bodies. In the Iliad in the Ambrosian Library the dead in the battle scenes are half the size of the living. In French medieval art the soul was depicted as a little child who was naked and usually sexless. The Last judgments lead the souls of the righteous to Abraham's bosom in this form. The dying man breathes the child out through his mouth in a symbolic representation of the soul's departure. This is also how the entry of the soul into the world is depicted, whether it is a case of a holy, miraculous conception - the Angel of the Annunciation presenting the Virgin with a naked child, Jesus's soul -- or a case of a perfectly natural conception: a couple resting in bed apparently quite innocently, but something must have happened, for a naked child can be seen flying through the air and entering the woman's mouth --the creation of the human soul by natural means.
In the course of the fourteenth and particularly the fifteenth century, these medieval types would develop further, but in the direction already indicated in the thirteenth century. We have already observed that the angel-cum-altar-boy would go on playing its part, without very much change, in the religious painting of the fifteenth century. On the other hand the theme of the Holy Childhood would never cease developing in both scope and variety from the fourteenth century on - its popularity and fecundity bearing witness to the progress, in the collective consciousness, of that idea of childhood which only a keen observer can distinguish in the thirteenth century and which did not exist at all in the eleventh century. In the group of Jesus and His mother, the artist would stress the graceful, affectionate, naive aspects of early childhood: the child seeking its mother's breast or getting ready to kiss or caress her, the child playing the traditional childhood games with fruit or a bird on a leash, the child eating its pap, the child being wrapped in its swaddling-clothes. Every gesture that could be observed - at least by somebody prepared to pay attention to them - would henceforth be reproduced in pictorial form. These features of sentimental realism would take a long time to extend beyond the frontiers of religious iconography, which is scarcely surprising when one remembers that this was also the case with landscape and genre painting. It remains none the less true that the group of Virgin and Child changed in character and became more and more profane: the picture of a scene of everyday life.
Timidly at first, then with increasing frequency, the painters of religious childhood went beyond that of Jesus. First of all they turned to the childhood of the Virgin, which inspired at least two new and popular themes: the theme of the birth of the Virgin -people in St Anne's bedroom fussing over the new-born child, bathing her, wrapping her in swaddling-clothes and showing her to her mother - and the theme of the Virgin's education: a reading lesson, with the Virgin following the words in a book held by St Anne. Then came other holy childhoods: those of St John, the infant Jesus's playmate, St James, and the children of the holy women, Mary Zebedee and Mary Salome. A completely new iconography thus came into existence, presenting more and more scenes of childhood, and taking care to gather together in similar groups these holy children, with or without their mothers.
This iconography, which generally speaking started with the fourteenth century, coincided with a profusion of priors' tales and legends, such as those in the Miracles de Notre-Dame. It continued up to the seventeenth century and its development can be followed in painting, tapestry and sculpture. We shall in any case have occasion to return to it with regard to the religious practices of childhood.
From this religious iconography of childhood, a lay iconography eventually detached itself in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was not yet the portrayal of the child on its own. Genre painting was developing at this time by means of the transformation of a conventional allegorical iconography inspired by the antiquo-medieva concept of Nature: ages of life, seasons, senses, elements. Subject pictures and anecdotal paintings began to take the place of static representations of symbolic characters. We shall have cause to deal with this evolution at some length later on. Let us merely note here that the child became one of the characters most frequently found in these anecdotal paintings: the child with his family; the child with his playmates, who were often adults; the child in a crowd, but very definitely 'spotlighted' in his mother's arms, or holding her hand or playing or even piddling; the child among the crowds watching miracles or martyrdoms, listening to sermons, or following liturgical rites such as presentations or circumcisions; the child serving as an apprentice to a goldsmith or a painter or some other craftsman; or the child at school, an old and popular theme which went back to the fourteenth century and would go on inspiring subject paintings up to the nineteenth century.
These subject paintings were not as a general rule devoted to the exclusive portrayal of childhood, but in a great many cases there were among the characters depicted, both principal and secondary. And this suggests the following ideas: first, children mingled with adults in everyday life, and any gathering for the purpose of work, relaxation or together both children and adults; secondly, painters were particularly fond of depicting childhood for its graceful or picturesque qualities (the taste for the picturesque anecdote developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and coincided with the appreciation of childhood's charms), and they delighted in stressing the presence of a child in a group or a crowd. Of these two ideas one now strikes us as out of date, for today, as also towards the end of the nineteenth century, we tend to separate the world of children from that of adults; the other foreshadows the modern idea of childhood.
The origins of the themes of the angel, the holy childhoods, and their subsequent iconographical developments date as far back as the thirteenth century; two new types of child portrayal appeared in the fifteenth century: the portrait and the putto. The child, as we have seen, was not missing from the Middle Ages, at least from the thirteenth century on, but there was never a portrait of him, the portrait of a real child, as he was at a certain moment of his life. In the funeral effigies listed in the Gaignieres Collection, the child appeared only at a very late date, in the sixteenth century. Curiously enough, his first appearance was not on his own tomb or that of his parents but on that of his teachers. On the tombs of the masters of Bologna, the teacher was shown surrounded by his pupils. As early as 1378, Cardinal de La Grange, the Bishop of Amiens, had the two princes he had tutored portrayed at the ages of ten and seven on a 'handsome Pillar' in his cathedral. No one thought of keeping a picture of a child if that child had either lived to grow to manhood or had died in infancy. in the first case, childhood was simply an unimportant phase of which there was no need to keep any record; in the second case, that of the dead child, it was thought that the little thing which had disappeared so soon in life was not worthy of remembrance: there were far too many children whose survival was problematical. The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the seventeenth century, in Le Caquet de l'accouchee, we have a neighbour, standing at the bedside of a woman who has just given birth, the mother of five 'little brats', and calming her fears with these words: 'Before they are old enough to bother you, you will have lost half of them, or perhaps all of them.' A strange consolation! People could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne's observation: 'I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow', or Moliere's comment on Louison in Le Malade imaginaire: 'The little girl doesn't count.' Most people probably felt, like Montaigne, that children had 'neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape'. Mme de Sevigne records without any sign of Surprise a similar remark made by Mme de Coetquen when the latter fainted on receiving the news of her little daughter's death: 'She is greatly distressed and says that she will never again have one so pretty.'
Nobody thought, as we ordinarily think today, that every child already contained a man's personality. Too many of them died. 'All mine die in infancy', wrote Montaigne. This indifference was a direct and inevitable consequence of the demography of the period. It lasted until the nineteenth century in the depths of the country, in so far as it was compatible with Christianity, which respected the immortal soul in every child that had been baptized. It is recorded that the people of the Basque country retained for a very long time the custom of burying children that had died without baptism in the house, on the threshold, or in the garden. Here we may perhaps see a survival of ancient rites, of sacrificial offerings, or rather that the child that had died too soon in life was buried almost anywhere, much as we today bury a domestic pet, a cat or a dog. He was such an unimportant little thing, so inadequately involved in life, that nobody had any fears that he might return after death to pester the living. It is interesting to note that in the frontispiece to the Tabula Cebetis Merian has placed the little children in a sort of marginal zone, between the earth from which they have emerged and the life into which they have not yet entered, and from which they are separated by a portico bearing the inscription Introitus ad vitam. This feeling of indifference towards a too fragile childhood is not really very far removed from the callousness of the Roman or Chinese societies which practiced the exposure of new-born children. We can now understand the gulf which separates our concept of childhood from that which existed before the demographic revolution or its preceding stages. There is nothing about callousness which should surprise us: it was only natural in the community conditions of the time. On the other hand, there are grounds for surprise in the earliness of the idea of childhood, seeing that conditions were still so unfavourable to it. Statistically and objectively speaking, this idea should have appeared much later. True, there was the taste for the picturesque, pleasing aspects of the little creatures, the idea of the charms of childhood and the entertainment to be derived from the ingenuous antics of infancy: 'puerile nonsense', as Montaigne said, which we adults take an interest 'for our amusement, like monkeys' But this idea could quite easily go hand in hand with indifference towards the essential, definitive personality of the child: the immortal soul. The new taste for the portrait indicated that children were emerging from the anonymity in which their slender chance of survival had maintained them. It is in fact quite remarkable that at that period of demographic wastage anyone should have felt a desire to record and keep the likeness of a child that would go on living or of a child that was dead. The portrait of the dead child in particular proves that that child was no longer generally considered as an inevitable loss. This solicitous attitude did not exclude or eliminate the opposite attitude, that of Montaigne, the neighbour at the mother's bedside, and Moliere: down to the eighteenth century they coexisted. It was only in the eighteenth century, with the beginning of Malthusianism and the extension of contraceptive practices, that the idea of necessary wastage would disappear.
The appearance of the portrait of the dead child in the sixteenth century accordingly marked a very important moment in the history of feelings. This portrait was a funeral effigy to begin with. The child was not at first portrayed alone, but on his parents' tomb. Gaignieres's records show the child by his mother's' side and very tiny, or else at his parents' feet. These tombs all date back to the sixteenth century: 1503, 1530, 156o. Among the interesting tombs in Westminster Abbey, let us note that of the Marchioness of Winchester, who died in 1586. The recumbent figure of the Marchioness is life-size; represented on the front of her tomb on a smaller scale are her husband the Marquess, kneeling, and the tiny tomb of a dead child. At Westminster too, on a tomb dating from 1615 to 1620, the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury are represented in a pair of recumbent figures, with their little daughter kneeling at their feet, her hands folded in prayer. It should be noted here that the children who surround the dead are not always dead themselves: the whole family. is gathered round the heads of that family, as if it were at the time when they breathed their last. But beside the children who are still alive the sculptor has portrayed those who are already dead; there is always an indication to distinguish them: they are smaller and they hold a cross in their hands (as on John Coke's tomb at Holkham, 1639) or else a skull (on Cope of Ayley's tomb at Hambledon, 1633, there are four boys and three girls around the dead parents, and one boy and one girl are holding a skull).
At Toulouse in the Musee des Augustins there is an extremely interesting triptych that comes from the Du Mege Collection. The volets are dated 1610. On either side of a 'Descent from the Cross' the donors, a husband and wife, are depicted on their knees, together with their ages. Both are sixty-three. Next to the man there is a child, wearing what was then the fashion for very little children, under five years of age: a girl's dress and pinafore and a big bonnet with feathers. The child is dressed in bright, rich colours, green brocaded in gold, which throw into relief the severity of the donors' black clothes. This woman of sixty-three cannot possibly have a child of five. It is clearly a dead child, no doubt an only son whose memory the old couple treasured and whom they wanted to show beside them in his best clothes.
It was a pious custom in the old days to present churches with a picture or a stained-glass window, and in the sixteenth century the donor had himself portrayed with his whole family. On the walls and pillars of German churches one can still see a great many pictures of this kind which are in fact family portraits. In St Sebastian's in Nurnberg, in a portrait from the second half of the sixteenth century, the father is shown in the foreground with two fun-grown sons behind him and then a scarcely distinguishable bunch of six boys crowded together, hiding behind each other so that some of them are barely visible. Surely these must be dead children.
A similar picture, dated 1560, and kept in Bregenz Museum, has the children's ages recorded on the banderoles: three boys, aged one, two and three; five girls, aged one, two, three, four and five. But the eldest girl of five has the same size and dress as the youngest of one. She has been given her place in the family group just as if she had gone on living, but she has been portrayed at the age when she died.
These family groups are naive, clumsy, monotonous works without style; their painters, like their models, remain unknown or obscure. It is a different matter when the donor has obtained the services of a celebrated painter: in such instances art historians have carried out the research required to identify the figures in a famous painting. This is the case with the Meyer family which Holbein portrayed in 1526 at the Virgin's feet. We know that of the six people in the picture three had died in 1626: Jacob Meyer's first wife and her two boys, one of whom were dead at the age of ten and the other, who is shown naked, at an earlier age.
Here in fact we have a custom which became widespread in the sixteenth century and remained so until the mid-nineteenth century. Versailles Museum has a picture by Nocret portraying the families of Louis XIV and his brother; this painting is famous because the King and the princes are half-naked - the men at least - like gods of Olympus. We would draw attention to one detail here: in the foreground, at Louis XIV's feet, Nocret has placed a framed picture showing two little children who had died in infancy.
Gaignieres's records note as early as the end of the sixteenth century some tombs bearing effigies of children on their own: one dates from 1584, the other from 1608. The child is shown in the costume peculiar to his age, in a dress and bonnet, like the child in the Toulouse 'Descent from the Cross'. When within the two years of 1606 and 1607 James I lost two daughters, one when she was three days old and the other at two years of age, he had them portrayed fully dressed on their tombs at Westminster, and he gave instructions that the younger should be shown lying in an alabaster cradle in which all the accessories - the lace of her swaddling- clothes and her bonnet - should be faithfully reproduced to create the illusion of reality. The inscription on the tomb gives a good idea of the pious feeling which endowed this three-day-old child with a definite personality: Rosula Regia prae-propero Fato decerpta, parentibtis erepta, ut in Christi Rosario reflorescat.
Apart from these mortuary effigies, portraits of children shown separately from their parents were a rarity until the end of the sixteenth century: witness the painting of the Dauphin, Charles Orlando, by the Maitre de Moulins, another instance of the pious regard felt for children who had died at an early age. On the other hand, they became very common at the beginning of the seventeenth century; it is clear that it had become customary to preserve by means of the painter's art the ephemeral appearance of childhood. In the portraits of this period the child parted company with the family, just as a century earlier, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the family had parted company with the religious section of the presentation portrait. Henceforth he would be depicted by himself and for himself: this was the great novelty of the seventeenth century. The child would be one of its favourite models. There are countless examples among the leading painters of the period: Rubes, Van Deck, Franz Halls, Le Naim, Philippe de Champaigne. Some of these painters portray little princes, as in the picture of Charles I's children by Van Dyck or that of James II's children by Larguilliere; others, the offspring of great lords, such as the three children painted by Van Dyck, the eldest of whom is wearing a sword; and others, well-to-do bourgeois such as those depicted by Le Naim or Philippe de Champaigne. Sometimes there is an inscription giving the child's name and age, as used to be the custom for adults. Now the child is all alone (see Philippe de Champaigne's work at Grenoble), now the painter gathers together several children from the same family. This last is a popular type of portrait, favoured by a great many anonymous painters, and often to be found in provincial art-galleries or in antique-shops. Henceforth every family wanted portraits of its children, and portraits painted while they were still children. The custom originated in the seventeenth century and is still with us. Photography took over from painting in the nineteenth century: the idea remained the same.
Before finishing with the portraits, we must mention the pictures of children on ex-votos, the plaques placed in churches to record the making or granting of a prayer. There are some in the museum of Puy Cathedral, and the Eighteenth Century Exhibition of 1958 in Paris revealed an astonishing portrait of a sick child which must also be an ex-voto.
Thus, although demographic conditions did not greatly change between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, and although child mortality remained at a very high level, a new sensibility granted these fragile, threatened creatures a characteristic which the world had hitherto failed to recognize in them: as if it were only then that the common conscience had discovered that the child's soul too was immortal. There can be no doubt that the importance accorded to the child's personality was linked with the growing influence of Christianity on life and manners.
This interest shown in the child preceded by more than a century the change in demographic conditions which can be roughly dated from Jenner's great discovery. Correspondences such as that of General de Martange show that certain families insisted at that time on having their children vaccinated; this precaution against the smallpox reveals a state of mind which must have favoured other hygienic practices at the same time, producing a reduction in the death-rate which was counterbalanced to some extent by an increasingly widespread control of the birth-rate.
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Another type of child portraiture unknown to the Middle Ages is the putto, the naked child. The putto made its appearance at the end of the fourteenth century and obviously represented a revival of the Hellenistic Eros. The theme of the naked child was immediately welcomed with extraordinary enthusiasm, even in France, where Italian art was encountering a certain native resistance. The Duc de Berry, according to his inventories, had a 'children's room', in other words a room hung with tapestries decorated with putti. Van Marle wonders whether sometimes the scribes responsible for the inventories did not use the word "children" to denote these semi-pagan angels, these putti who so often adorned the foliage of tapestries in the second half of the fifteenth century.
In the sixteenth century the putto invaded the world of painting and became an ornamental motif which was repeated ad nauseam. Titian in particular used or rather abused it: witness the 'Triumph of Venus' in the Prado.
The seventeenth century showed no sign of tiring of it, whether in Rome, in Naples, or at Versailles, where the putti still kept the old name of marmousets. Religious art succumbed to them, thanks to the transformation of the medieval angelicum-altar-boy into a putto. Henceforth, with one exception (the guardian angel) the angel would no longer be the adolescent still to be seen in Botticelli's paintings: he too had become a little naked Eros, even if, in order to satisfy post-tridentine modesty, his nudity was concealed behind clouds, mists and veils.
The putto's nudity spread even to Jesus and the other holy children. If the artist was reluctant to adopt this complete nudity, he simply made it a little more discreet, taking care not to give Jesus too many clothes: He was shown with His mother undoing His swaddling-clothes, or His shoulders and His legs were uncovered. Pere du Colombier has already pointed out with regard to the paintings by Lucca della Robbia in the Hopital des Innocents that it was impossible to portray childhood without stressing its nudity. The taste for child nudity was obviously linked with the general taste for classical nudity which had even begun to affect modern portraiture. But it lasted much longer and it acted the whole of ornamental art: witness Versailles or the ceiling of the Villa Borghese in Rome. The taste for the putto corresponded to something far deeper than the taste for classical nudity, something which can be ascribed only to a broad surge of interest in childhood.
Like the medieval child - a holy child, or a symbol of the soul, or an angelic being - the putto was never a 'real, historic child in either the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. This is all the more remarkable in that the theme of the putto originated and developed at the same time as the child portrait. But the children in fifteenth and sixteenth century portraits are never, or scarcely ever, naked children. Either they are wrapped in swaddling-clothes even when they are portrayed kneeling in prayer, or else they are shown wearing the dress of their age and station. Nobody could visualize the historic child, even when he was very small, in the nudity of the mythological and ornamental child, and this distinction remained in force for a long time.
The final phase of child iconography was to be the application of the putto's ornamental nudity to the child portrait, and this too was to take place in the seventeenth century. True, a few portraits of naked children are to be noted in the sixteenth century, but they are comparatively rare. One of the oldest is probably the child in Holbein's painting of the Meyer family who bad died in infancy (1521). Then too, in one of the halls in Innsbruck Palace, there is a fresco in which Maria Theresa wanted to gather together all her children: next to the living, a dead princess is portrayed in a very chastely draped state of nudity.
In a picture by Titian Of 1571 Or 1575, Philip II in a dedicatory gesture is shown holding out to Victory his son, the Child Ferdinand, who is completely naked: he looks like Titian's usual putto, and he seems to be finding the situation extremely funny: the putti were often depicted at play.
In 1560 Veronese in accordance with custom portrayed the Cucina-Fiacco family in front of the Virgin and Child: three men, including the father, one woman - the mother - and six children. On the far right a woman is almost cut in half by the edge of the picture: she is holding a naked child in her arms just as the Virgin is holding the Holy Child, a resemblance stressed by the fact that the woman is not wearing the dress of her time. Pushed to one side as she is, she cannot be the mother of the family: perhaps she is the wet-nurse of the youngest child. A mid-sixteenth century painting by the Dutchman P. AErtsen shows a family: the father, a boy about five, a girl of four, and the mother sitting with a naked child in her lap.
There are sure to have been other cases which more extensive research would bring to light, but they were not numerous enough to create a general taste.
In the seventeenth century, portrayals of this sort became more numerous and more typical: witness the portrait at Munich of Helen Fourment carrying her naked son, who is distinguished from the ordinary putto not only by the resemblance to his mother but also by a plumed bonnet of the sort that children wore at the time. The youngest of Charles I's children painted by Van Dyck in 1637 is shown next to his brothers and sisters, naked, and half covered by the linen on which he has been laid.
'When, in 1647,' writes L. Hautecoeur, 'Le Brun portrays the banker and collector Jabach in his Rue Saint-Merri house, he shows us this powerful man casually dressed, with his stockings pulled on anyhow, displaying his latest acquisition to his wife and son... his other children are present: the last-born, naked as an Infant Jesus, is lying on a cushion, and one of his sisters is playing with him.' The little Jabach, more than the naked children of Holbein, Veronese, Titian, Van Dyck and even Rubens, has exactly the same pose as that of the modern baby in front of the studio photographer's camera. Henceforth the nudity of the little child was to be a convention of the genre, and all the little children who had always been so ceremoniously dressed up in the time of Le Nain and Philippe de Champaigne would be depicted naked. This convention is to be found both in the work of Larguilliere, the painter of the upper middle- class, and in that of Mignard, the court painter: the Grand Dauphin's youngest child, in the painting by Mignard in the Louvre, is lying naked on a cushion by his mother, just like the little Jabach.
Either the child is completely naked, as in Mignard's portrait of the Comte de Toulouse, where his nudity is scarcely veiled by the loop of a ribbon which has come undone for the occasion, or in Larguilliere's portrait of a child holding a billhook; or else he is dressed not in a real costume similar to the clothes generally worn at the time but in a negligee which fails to cover his nudity and indeed often reveals it: witness the children's portraits by Belle in which the legs and feet are bare, or Mignard's Duc de Bourgogne, dressed in nothing but a flimsy shift. There is no need to follow any further the history of this theme, which by now had become conventional. It can be found again at its conclusion in the family albums and studio photographers' shop windows of yesterday: babies baring their little bottoms just for the pose - for they were normally carefully covered, swaddled or breeched - and little boys and girls who were dressed for the occasion in nothing but a pretty transparent shift. There was not a single child whose likeness was not preserved in a nude study, directly inherited from the putti of the Renaissance: a remarkable example of the persistence in the collective taste (bourgeois as much as lower-class) of a theme which was originally ornamental The Eros of antiquity, rediscovered in the fifteenth century, went on serving as a model for the 'artistic portraits' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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The reader of the preceding pages will not have failed to notice the importance of the seventeenth century in the evolution of the themes of childhood. It was in the seventeenth century that portraits of children on their own became numerous and commonplace. It was in the seventeenth century too that the family portrait, a much older genre, tended to plan itself around the child. This concentration on the child is particularly striking in the Rubens family group in which the mother is holding the child by the shoulder while the father has him by the hand, and in the works of Franz Hals, Van Dyck and Lebrun, whose children kiss, cuddle and generally enliven the group of serious adults with their games or their affection. The baroque painter depended on them to give his group portrait the dynamism that it lacked. In the seventeenth century too, subject painting gave the child a place of honour, with countless childhood scenes of a conventional character: the reading lesson, in which the theme of the Virgin's lesson survived in lay form from the religious iconography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the music lesson, and groups of boys and girls reading, drawing and playing. One could go on indefinitely fisting these themes which were extremely common in painting, especially in the first half of the century, and in engraving later. Finally, as we have seen, it was in the second half of the seventeenth century that nudity became an essential convention in child portraiture. No doubt the discovery of childhood began in the thirteenth century, and its progress can be traced in the history of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But the evidence of its development became more plentiful and significant from the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth.
This is confirmed by the interest shown at that time in little children's habits and 'jargon'. We have already noted, in the preceding chapter, how they were given new names: bambins, pitchouns and fanfans. People also amused themselves by picking up their children's expressions and using their vocabulary, that is to say, the vocabulary used by their nannies when speaking to them. It is a rare thing for literature, even of the most popular kind, to preserve traces of children's jargon. Yet some such traces are to be found in the Divina Commedia: 'What further glory win you have if you leave an aged flesh than if you had died before you bad stopped saying pappo and dindi.' Pappo is bread. The word existed in the French language of Dante's time: le papin. It is to be found in one of the Miracles de Notre-Dame, that of 'the little child who feeds the picture of Jesus in Our Lady's arms'. But is the word papin really confined to childhood, or does it not rather belong to the familiar speech of everyday life? Be that as it may, the Miracles de Notre-Dame, like other sixteenth-century texts, bears witness to a certain taste for childhood painted from life. But references to children's jargon are unusual before the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century they are to be found in abundance. To take one example, a collection of prints by Bouzonnet and Stella, dated 1657: this collection contains a series of engravings showing putti at play. There is nothing original about the drawings, but the captions, written in appalling doggerel, speak the jargon of infancy and also schoolboy slang, for the limits of infancy were still anything but clear at the time. A plate showing putti playing with hobbyhorses is entitled 'Le Dada'.
Some putti are playing at dice.
One goes away, and number two
Consoles himself with his toutou.
The papin of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must have been dropped, at least from the speech of French bourgeois children, possibly because it was not confined to infancy. But other childish words had appeared which are still in use today: toutou and dada. Apart from this nursery language, the putti also use school slang or the slang of military academies. In the caption to a drawing of a sledge game the word populo, from school Latin, is used. In the same childish sense, Mme de Sevigne would refer to Mme de Grignan's children as ce petit pueple. One child who shows exceptional skill is referred to as ce cadet, a term used in the academies where young gentlemen at the beginning of the seventeenth century were taught fencing, riding and the arts of war. Under another picture, we are told that children go and play tennis as soon as they have campos: an academy expression, a military term, which means 'to have leave'. It was widely used in everyday speech, and can be found in Mme de Sevigne. Again, we are shown some children bathing and are told that the others are drinking to the health of their camarades. This term, which was also new or at least did not date back further than the late sixteenth century, was obviously of military origin (possibly it came from the Germans or German-speaking mercenaries) and went through the academies. Incidentally it would always be more or less confined to the familiar speech of the French middle class. it is still not used in French lower-class speech, which prefers the older word copain, from the medieval compaing.
But let us return to the jargon of infancy. in Cyrano de Bergerac's Le Pedant joui, Granger calls his son his toutou: 'Come and kiss me, come my toutou.' The word bonbon, which I suppose originated in nannies' jargon, was admitted to everyday speech. And attempts were even made to give onomatopoeic renderings of the speech of children who had not yet learnt to talk. Thus Mme de Sevigne laboriously noted the noises made by her little daughter and reported them to Mme de Grignan who was then in Provence: 'She talks most amusingly: titota, tetita, y totata. Already, at the beginning of the century, Heroard, Louis XIII's doctor, had carefully recorded in his diary his charge's childish pronunciation of certain words: vela for voila, equivez for ecrivez, and so on.
When she describes her little daughter, her 'little darling', Mme de Sevigne paints genre pictures similar to those of Le Nain or Bosse, with the pretty affectation of late seventeenth-century engravers and eighteenth-century artists besides. 'Our daughter is a dark-haired little beauty. She is very pretty indeed. Here she comes. She gives me sticky kisses, but she never screams.' 'She kisses me, she recognizes me, she laughs at me, she calls me just plain Maman [instead of Bonne Maman.] 'I simply adore her. I have had her hair cut: it is a happy-go-lucky style now which is just made for her. Her complexion, her chest and her little body are admirable. She does a hundred and one different things: she caresses, she slaps, she makes the sign of the cross, she begs pardon, she drops a curtsy, she blows a kiss, she shrugs her shoulders, she dances, she strokes, she holds her chin: in a word she is pretty in every particular. I watch her for hours on end.' Countless mothers and nannies had already felt the same way. But not a single one had admitted that these feelings were worthy of being expressed in such an ambitious form. These literary scenes of childhood correspond to those of contemporary genre painting and engraving: each reflected the discovery of infancy, of the little child's body, habits and chatter.
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