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The Baroque Child
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- 1991 Proceedings
- pp. 241-250
- 10.1353/chq.1991.0045
- Article
- Additional Information
The Baroque Child Childhood, Entertainment and Representation What magic is it that has one of the ogre's daughters drawn by Gustave Doré to illustrate the Perrault tale, "Tom Thumbe, " lie in her bed with the air of a Baroque angel sleeping amidst a billowing mass of clouds? And why do the dead children arranged on a silver platter in the home of the other ogre, the one in "Puss and Boots, " in the same 1862 edition, assume the languishing pose of the putti of Baroque art? Again, why nearer to our own time, in 1986, does the French illustrator Kelek1 represent Donkey-Skin, another famous Charles Perrault heroine, and give the young girl the clothing and pose of the Infanta Margaret of Austria, who was depicted by Velazquez on several occasions bedecked in laces and brocade and a splendid robe, and more particularly in the famous 1656 painting "Las Meninas"? Velazquez, one of the leading Baroque painters of his time, very significantly also presides over the treatment of childhood given in the historical novel by the American novelist Elizabeth Bortón de Trevino, I Juan de Pareja (1965), which has been highly successful in the recent French translation. These regular incursions of Baroque art into iconography and into novels intended for young readers appear to correspond with an abiding interest, which cannot fail to arouse the curiosity of the contemporary observer: is there some special link between childhood and Baroque art, which precedes classical art as youth precedes maturity? Without attempting to demonstrate phony parallels, I should note that in the case of the Perrault stories, the process of revival is the source of the stories themselves, which are, as the title of the 1697 collection indicates. Stories of Times Past (Histoires du Temps Passé) : it originates in the reminiscences of the old storyteller, the "granny" from whom Pierre Darmancour, the Academician's son, gathered the Mother Goose tales. Though timeless, these tales were recorded no earlier than 1630 to 1650, i.e., the period of the childhood of Charles Perrault himself and the apogee of Baroque art, characterized by courtly feasts, which were later superseded by the rigor of the classical style. Considering the Baroque of the stories as an effect of the nostalgia of the storytellers gives a psychological foundation to the rule formulated by Philippe Aries, that the cultural objects reach children with some delay; one can understand how the writers, aging Baroque people, tried to transmit these delights for the pleasure of their grandchildren ,and of the artists who were to illustrate them. Thus the thesis which I intend to demonstrate can be stated in the form of this question: is the Baroque child not part of an art permanently linked to 241 resurgences of "popular" theatricality which imposes itself as the expression of an imagination repressed by the dominant culture? The Uneven Pearls of the Kingdom of Reason What does the term "Baroque art" really mean? As attractive as it is ambiguous, this term has given rise to many different exegeses, so well summarized by Marc Fumaroli in his preface to the re-edition of Victor L. Tapié' s book. Baroque et Classicisme, that there is no need to go into these details here. I would simply point out that two categories of impassioned critics clash there: one group, strict historians, stress an aesthetic current, limited in time, which involved the plastic arts and flourished from 1580 to 1650 in Italy and in France, and then spread slowly into Central Europe and Russia or South America until the eighteenth century. The other school, including Eugenio d'Ors, in a study which produced a sensation in 1935, and Jean Rousset, does not hesitate to extend the concept to literature and culture in general and considers Baroque art as the expression of an archetypal structural attitude. In their opinion, this style points to a permanent bent in human beings, referring us by antithesis to a Dionysian tendency which prevents or delays the coming and return of Apollo's order. In this first perspective. Baroque art is closely connected to the religious trend of the Counter Reformation and the growth of the cult of the Virgin and...