The Rhetoric of Children’s Tears and Crying in the Works of Western European Fine Art

The article examines the specifics of how crying, one of the strongest emotional reactions of a person, be it an adult or a child, and tears as its frequent manifestation are reflected in fine art. The chosen research material is mainly presented by the works of the Western European artists of the 16th — early 21st centuries which depict various images of crying infants and young children. This choice is not accidental, since it was in Western Europe in the chronological period under consideration that the existing concept of childhood was established and developed, within which a certain rehabilitation of the child’s emotional world took place. While looking for optimal means of artistic expression, the artists revised the concept of a child’s face and body, behaviour patterns, often based on what their predecessors had proposed, but giving it a new interpretation. Crying and sobbing, as well as laughter and roars, were symptomatically rare in fine art, since they assumed a strong distortion of a child’s face. The appearance of such emotions in images was often due to significant developments both in the artistic and creative principles of the artists’ work and in the understanding of childhood, and man in the whole. The discovery of the emotional world and the search for ways to embody it in graphics, painting, and sculpture during the Italian Renaissance became an incentive for the masters of subsequent times, who conducted bold experiments in the field of physiognomy and were interested in the borderline states of human nature. Giving them a certain freedom, the image of a child was the most convenient form for expressing such searches.