IL TEMPO DEL GIOCO. PERCORSI LUDICI TRA STORIA LETTERATURA E IMMAGINI IN ETA' MODERNA. SECC. XV-XVII

Games and playing have always been present in the cultural dimension of children, when one considers them as individual subjects. Hence, in this essay, research has been oriented on carefully selected patterns in order to explore the topic of childhood games. Literary, historical and iconographic sources have been taken into consideration, and the accounts of the contemporaries have been analysed individually to provide an interpretation of gestures, traces and evidences of childhood games. The results have been compared and combined to create a coherent picture of children playtime in a time-span between fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Assuming the existence of a certain continuity, as far as childhood games are concerned, between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, what happened to pass through a visible transformation is the way in which the activity of playing was considered. This transformation paralleled the social evolution which can be observed on the threshold of Modern age. All the most significative phenomena and the strongest incentives can be observed in this period when perception and valorisation of child games changed in the most rapid fashion. Games were initially seen as activities tolerable only when considered as the expression of the immaturity of those who are not yet adults, and were compared to the purely instinctive activities of the animal soul, according to St. Agustine’s doctrine. Christian medieval hagiographists would present them as a negative example in the celebrations of the detachment from vain entertainments. Renaissance humanists reappraised games for their educative function. It is now possible to provide a precise explanation of this re-discovered appreciation: it depended on the acknowledgement of children’s springs of vitality and to the valorisation of such recreational activities as precious sources to help children to grow up in a correct and healthy way and to reach a good psycho-physic harmony. The game allows to avoid indolence and functions as an antidote to the negative humours which render the body more vulnerable to diseases. In addition, games were believed to the help body to balance the excessive warmth and humidity which characterise the first years of a child. During the sixteenth century, children games became the focus of a global project of civilisation of the individual and of his activities. Children games were prescribed, codified and inserted in what may be called a “regulated sociality”. The physicality of the body of the child, long felt as physically fragile and of little social importance, becoame a dimension which needed to be disciplined. Manuals of good behaviour theorised a civilisation of games, according to the assumption that a good education and civil attitude towards the other players must be necessarily implied and that ethos and ludus were complements of each other. The act of playing would find its place in time, space and society and was circumscribed, codified, and framed. Children were assigned different activities and recreational typologies according to their sex and age. It became evident that controlling and observing the recreational outwards of younger children was a major must. New institutions with specific educational purposes, the Jesuit schools colleges, were created and interventions more and more pervasive were attempted in order to rationalise and arrange the time and space which were to be dedicated to children games. Erasmus, Jean Luis Vivès, Mathurin Cordier, Comenio and Locke rediscovered the pedagogical and didactic function of the recreational experience. A mentor could take advantage of this to stimulate a quicker learning and a deeper involvement on the part of the pupils. Games became cheerful, gratifying and enjoyable. They were now seen as something extremely simulating for the senses and perceptions even for very small children. The idea of a “collective child” (the mobs of children described by Garzoni, Citolini and Antoniano) was substituted by the idea of the “individual child” (like the little Medici princes, young dauphin Luis XII of France, Thomas Platter, Baldo) who plays individually. In this period games were acknowledged as an important element in children life, as a social rite, as a vehicle of civilisation and as a model for the assimilation of social roles and competences. Time and space for playing were not distributed in the same way for all children. For children of humble origins, the space for playing seems to have been somehow dilated and expanded since common children could play everywhere: in peasant houses, in barns, in stables, in markets, in taverns. Time, on the other hand, was compressed and reduced to few moments in which children were free from productive activities in which they were necessarily employed even if very young. In art as well, especially in Holland, during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more and more representations of games and toys for children can be found. Playing, which was earlier considered as a mere physical activity, became also a symbolic exercise, a way of expressing with body and gestures. Though still belonging to the concrete aspects of life, games were now considered also as a powerful metaphor of existence which was worth representing in art. Artists inserted games and toys in a set of canons of representation related to symbols, imagination and metaphors. Moreover, games were now endowed with new meanings and codes which addressed adults more than children. The notion of children games of the former ages was therefore re-arranged and re-defined and assumed more complex aspects and frames. Thus the foundations were laid for the successive and original acknowledgement of the idea of a substantial identity between childhood, nature and freedom, which would be fully developed in the following ages.