Abstract
The Hellenistic period is often credited with discovering, and delighting in, the child’s body as aesthetic object. This article revisits this claim, not to revise the moment of invention but to identify exactly how far this investment in the child’s body extended. Focusing on two of Hellenistic style’s most famous examples, the Laocoon group and the Uffi zi Niobids, it demonstrates that there was still a place for the ‘miniadult’, and a distinct limit to the ways in the body of the typical Hellenistic child or ‘proto-putto’ could be used in representation. This results in new readings of these important sculptures, and a more nuanced understanding of the limits and requirements of the visual as identifi ed most famously by Lessing, limits and requirements which can be set next to modern anxieties about the visualization of childhood. In this way, the issues of pain and art and art and text are approached from a new angle.
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