Children’s Drawings
Ale Nodarse May 7, 2024
Children’s drawings abound. They have few dates and fewer titles, but nonetheless they pile up. Assembled on fridges or tucked away in shoeboxes, they belong to a world of their own. It’s a world they, with few inhibitions, create –– and a world which is fragile. If such drawings survive, it’s most often because they have been saved by someone else. In other words, if drawings from your childhood survive, then you most likely have someone to thank.
Children’s drawings may be quaint, but they are powerful, too. In Bologna, in 1882, an Italian archaeologist and art historian called Corrado Ricci took shelter from the rain beneath a covered archway. That portico, to Ricci’s amazement, was filled with adolescent scribblings, with graffitied words and drawings. Here was a “permanent exhibition of literature and art” — one of rare modesty and more than occasional impropriety¹. The exhibition moved him and led him to collect children’s drawings, assembled in a book titled ‘The Art of Children’ (L’arte dei bambini). Lamenting the drawings’ anonymity, Ricci was determined to trace their history. The Art of Children is replete with works from his collection. It charts a course from first lines to full figures and makes a case for the life of a child’s mind. It charts, as well, the beginnings of a particular branch of developmental psychology. One in which, for instance, a “Table and Chair” becomes a proof of spatial cognition; and where a quickly dashed “Sun” rises in attestation as if to say: Observe the work of a child, year six.²
Human children have drawn for millennia (and so, quite likely, did their neanderthal cousins)³. Remarkable though it is, this fact ought not surprise us. Ricci’s revelation, that such drawings have much to teach us, did however seem surprising (at least to many of his peers). Turning away from the product of children’s drawing to the process of its collection (on the fridge or in the shoebox), we might wonder: What causes us to marvel at a child’s drawing in the first place?
This act of marveling has a history. One of the earliest images of a child’s drawing was not by a painter, but by an archaeologist and antiquarian. That painting, Giovanni Caroto’s c. 1515 Portrait of a Boy With Drawing, is marvelously strange.⁴ Strange, given that children were rarely depicted apart from their parents — as having their own distinct lives.⁵ And stranger, still, because this child holds a drawing. Curving slightly at the grasped edge, the paper reveals a standing figure, a partial head, and, just above the boy’s thumb, an eye placed in profile.
Why set such a drawing in painting? Scholars have sought a familial link between the artist and the boy.⁶ His carrot-colored hair has provoked speculation that he is indeed the artist’s son (or younger nephew), namely since Caroto means “Carrot.” But Caroto’s other vocation remains suggestive. As an archaeologist, he spent years compiling a list of the antiquities in his hometown of Verona, tasked with the setting of “timeless” fragments back into time.⁷ Viewed as testimonies of human creation, every fragment –– drawn and discovered –– could be beheld as eloquent. Whether made by his relative or not, Caroto found the boy’s drawing worthy of similar preservation.
Children’s drawings, a marvel in their own right, raise a question that children do not ask. What do we — looking back, looking ahead — consign to loss? And what do we save?
¹Corrado Ricci, L’arte dei bambini (The Art of Children) (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887), 3–4.
²Helga Eng, The Psychology of Children's Drawings: From the First Stroke to the Coloured Drawing (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1931). (Fig. 62, reproduced from her text.)
³Jean-Claude Marquet (et al.), “The Earliest Unambiguous Neanderthal Engravings on Cave Walls: La Roche–Cotard, Loire Valley, France,” PLoS ONE (2023): 1–53.
⁴The painting, made with oil on board, is kept at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy.
⁵Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 43. Ariès proposed, not without significant controversy, that the turning point for the representation and understanding of the child as such was the beginning of the seventeenth century. .
⁶Francesca Rossi (et al.), Caroto (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2020), 134.
⁷Caroto captured Verona’s antiquities through a series of engravings first published in 1540, with a text by antiquarian and humanist Torello Saraina.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
