Mirrors of Reality? Material Culture, Historical Sensation, and the Significance of Images for Research into Long-Term Educational Processes

Abstract

Images can be of major value for research into long-term educational processes in working as clues—a concept coined by Carlo Ginzburg—to childhood and education in the past. In this chapter, the question is asked whether or not such images are also mirrors of reality. It seems that while there is always symbolic and moral space between clues and reality, they are not off all reality as is shown for Dutch seventeenth century Golden Age paintings, drawings and emblems. This is true both for paintings and drawings that were intentionally made to represent real people, namely family portraits and children’s portraits, as well as for paintings and drawings that were not intentionally made to represent real people but to show patterns of behaviour, or misbehaviour, namely genre paintings and emblem books. The first group of images refers to real families—notwithstanding the fact that sometimes those families remain a mystery, as can be seen with the Rembrandt family portrait—while the second group refers to desired or undesired patterns of behaviour. But also the first group could function as transmitters of—sometimes hidden—educational ambitions and models of behaviour. It is concluded that, because of their great popularity in the seventeenth century, the images mentioned are strong sources for the history of education and childhood. By buying Steen’s canvasses or other genre paintings and drawings, by looking at them when educating their children, by reading emblematic books by Cats, or, for the orthodox-protestants, family advice books by Koelman and Wittewrongel, among others, and by enjoying text and images of those books, the broad Dutch bourgeois followed, within a highly visual culture, a self-paid, self-chosen, self-constructed course in educational and moral literacy.