The Rhythm of Images

The complex partnership between words and images that is typical of the picture book becomes the equivalent of a poetical composition, i.e., a series of verses in which rhymes, assonance and meter punctuate emotions, feelings and narrative flow. Why did we say a poetical composition and not a painting or a musical composition, since acoustic and figurative elements of these two forms of artistic expression are present—as we can evince from the following examples—in the picture book?

There are two foremost elements of a picture book: words and images. They live in a perfect symbiosis, a mysterious synchrony, perceived as such by the reader-viewer. It is a symbiosis not present (with a few notable exceptions) in any other form of artistic expression.

This interaction is difficult to explain, and it has been the subject of numerous essays that have often categorized and explained it through terms typical of music theory (as countermelody, antiphon, duet, to mention only a few.)

The use of musical terminology is perhaps motivated by the fact that the transmission of sensations and emotions through music allows us to understand intuitively how the reader-viewer absorbs written text and pictorial narrative simultaneously, without one of the elements prevailing over the other. However, the literary genre that remains the closest to the picture book is by far poetry, even when the picture book consists exclusively of images and does not contain any words other than the title, which already possesses a specific semantic weight and value.

Using the definition poetical composition, I have chosen to emphasize not the special environment in which the picture book comes to life, or the atmosphere around it, but the amalgam of sound, rhythm, color, meaning, spatial meter—the list could continue—and the unique finished product together with the impact it has on the reader-viewer. This is clearly the result of a special alchemy, and it is extremely difficult to analyze and separate the harmonious choice of elements, the clever combination of ingredients, the juxtaposition of mosaic tesserae of different proportions.

Despite the difficulty of analyzing the poetical composition, we can try to accomplish this—even if we are not certain we will be able to identify the precise mechanisms of creation—starting with an overview of the most important Italian authors/illustrators of children's and young adult books after World War II. The definition of "children and young adults" is really only a classification made by librarians and publishing houses. In fact, children, young adults, and even adults are the addressees of the poetic messages that are the subject of the present article. These messages are almost like musical scores consisting of typographical characters, marks, lines, colors, perspective, and cleverly manipulated spaces, which evoke not only sounds, but also tactile sensations, emotions, and moods. Due to space constraints, I have chosen to present only five artists, in chronological order, who are really different from one another and can illustrate how the alchemist's concoction of words and images is the result of the personality and ideas of the individual artist.

The quintessential component of Bruno Munari's (1907-1998) production is "playfulness." His "invitation to play" is based on the element of surprise, on the unexpected, that often takes on the guise of a thought-provoking question to the reader, whose answer is equivalent to the position of lector in fabula (as in Umberto Eco's essay of the same title).

From the lyrical point of view, we can say that Munari revived in his picture books the atmosphere of traditional counting or nursery rhymes, whimsical and unforgettable, and even some of the limerick's sense of humor. As an example we can mention Nella notte buia ("In the Dark Night"), in which even the medium, the very paper itself, transmits poetical sensations and emotions. The book consists, in fact, of a series of pages in black paper, of considerable weight, on which we see...