Child’s play

Anyone who has children and likes art usually thinks their own kid’s drawings are genius. We did, but then in our case it was true. Children’s drawings probably appeal because of their immediacy and the way you can see them working things out as they go. It’s the same clarity that artists crave, prompting Picasso to famously declare, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ Knowing all this it was still amazing to be wandering through the galleries of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona and come across this work by Giovanni Francesco Caroto. It wasn’t that we were surprised that Italian kids drew in much the same way as children all over the world, but that they were doing it in the early sixteenth century.