The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso’s Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the ‘discovery of childhood’. Famous pictures by great artists, as well as barely known anonymous artefacts, illustrate not only Western society’s perennially ambivalent attitudes to children, but also the many and varied functions that works of art have played throughout its history.
- ISBN10 0300101317
- ISBN13 9780300101317
- Publish Date 10 November 2006
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780300101317