Barbara Wittmann

Introduction: Knowledge in the Making: Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques

Drawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription.

A Neolithic childhood: Children’s drawings as prehistoric sources

Bedeutung (Wiesbaden, 2001), pp. 43–44. 2. E.g., the children’s drawings on birch bark dating from 1220– 1230 found during an excavation in Novgorod: R. Baldy and D. Fabre, “Des enfants dessinateurs au Moyen Âge. Note documentaire,” Gradhiva 9 (2009): 152–163. Written mention of children’s drawings is found, for example, in a novella by Boccaccio (novel VI). On children’s drawings surviving from the early modern period—most of them in schoolbooks—see H. Arndt, “‘Johannes est stultus. Amen’: Kinderzeichnungen eines Lateinschülers aus den Tagen des Erasmus,” in Argo: Festschrift für Kurt Badt, ed. Martin Gosebruch and Lorenz Dittmann (Cologne, 1970), pp. 261–276; W. Kemp, “. . . einen wahrhaft bildenden Zeichenunterricht überall einzuführen”: Zeichnen und Zeichenunterricht der Laien 1500–1870. Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 25–31; L. Rubin, “First Draft Artistry: Children’s Drawings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Children of Mercury: The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exh. cat. (Providence, 1984), pp. 10–19; U. Pfisterer, “Erste Werke und Autopoiesis: Der Topos künstlerischer Frühbegabung im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Visuelle Topoi: Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance, ed. U. Pfisterer and M. Seidel (Munich, 2003), pp. 263–264. 3. P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick (New York, 1962). Initial investigations of Louis’s drawings are found in Kemp (see note 2), pp. 42–45, and in M. Foisil (ed.), Journal de Jean Héroard (Paris, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 161–167. See also M. S. Houston, “The Early Drawings of Louis XIII in the Journal de Jean Héroard,” in When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child, ed. J. Fineberg (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 61–76. 4. Nicholas Stargardt, for example, in his history of childhood under National Socialism, has undertaken an interesting attempt at making serious use of children’s drawings as sources for the historical experience of their creators; see N. Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London, 2006). Also of interest is the investigation of children’s drawings in relation to avant-garde art, for example, in J. Boissel, “Quand les enfants se mirent a dessiner, 1880–1914: Un fragment de l’histoire des idées,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 31 (1990); J. Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, 1997); Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism, ed. J. Fineberg (Princeton, 1998), pp. 157–200; E. Pernoud, L’invention du dessin d’enfant en France, à l’aube des avant-gardes (Paris, 2003). Children’s drawings have been around for a long time. Maybe they were always there: in the sand by the water, on the bark of trees, on stones and rocks. In his investigations of antique graffiti, the archaeologist Martin Langner has noted that in the coral reef of graffiti scratched onto exterior walls in Pompeii and within the catacombs of Rome, there are drawings presumably created by children on account of their low position on the wall and their characteristic cephalopod form (fig. 1).1 Since the High Middle Ages, and especially since the late Middle Ages, visual and textual sources documenting the history of children’s drawings have become more abundant, although relatively few prenineteenth-century drawings or marginal doodles in books have survived to the present day.2 Children have been drawing for a long time, and it is hard to imagine them not doing so in any culture that knew the use of scratching or writing instruments and permitted forms of visual representation. The most astonishing surviving historical document is quite certainly a collection of drawings produced by the child who would go down in history as Louis XIII. It is thanks to his personal physician Jean Héroard that around a dozen of his drawings were conserved. On account of the child’s weak constitution, his doctor continually monitored his growth with the aid of a diary. Keeping an “archive” of the boy’s doodles and drawings was a part of this effort (fig. 2). Although Héroard’s diary aroused the intense interest of historians and psychoanalysts, in particular serving Philippe Ariès as the main source of his pioneering study on the history of childhood, a thorough evaluation of the dauphin’s childhood drawings has not yet been undertaken.3 In recent decades the research of social, educational, and science historians, as well as literary scholars and art historians, has demonstrated the diversity and heterogeneity of the factors leading to the constitution of childhood as a realm of experience sui generis. And yet, while entire research projects and institutes are devoted to the study of books written for children, the graphic productions of children themselves have only been accorded the status of historical sources in a few exceptional cases.4 This methodological skepticism within the historical sciences is likely a result not only of the relative paucity of surviving children’s drawings and relevant textual sources dating from before 1900; it is also an indicator of the methodological problem A Neolithic childhood