Le droit au jeu dans la peinture vénitienne au XVIe siècle

Children’s right to play in XVIth century Venetian painting
Playing is a inherent activity for childhood. Yet, in 15th or 16th century Italian painting, games are hard to notice, especially when children are concerned. This difficulty leads to the absence of studies about children’s way of playing. Indeed, either they were considered as adults-to-be and studied as such, or their characteristics were accepted but then scholars did not want to study them, because children’s activities were not considered interesting enough. In this article, I try to study pictorial representations of children’s game in 16th century Venetian family portraits to prove they had the right to play, and that this right was determined by their age and their gender.