Imagining Childhood.

New Haven:: Yale University Press, 2006.. 1st Edition.. Hardbound . BINDING/CONDITION: brown boards; a Fine book, with a Fine dust jacket.. about 10.75 inches tall by 8 inches wide . Notes, index. Light mustard endpapers. Description: Well illustrated, with much in color. From the jacket blurb: ''Children's games and toys have been used by artists as metaphors for the expectations, achievements and fallibility of adult life throughout the history of Western art. And similarly the natural and instinctive character of children's relationships has been symbolized by relations with animals. Miracles become all the more emotive and impressive when they involve birth or the rescue of children from mortal danger. Illness, death and commemoration are made both more powerful and more palatable through the depiction of children, whether it be the Massacre of the Innocents, the iconography of foundlings, or the transmutation of dead babies into putti. In this book that ranges widely across time, national boundaries and genres, 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 artifacts, 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.''