Between “Excerpts, Letters and Moveable Findings”. The Magazine Schedario and the Critical Reflection on Children’s Illustration

Abstract

After World War II, various scholars writing in «Schedario» (1953-1998) initiated a debate to redefine the literary field for child readers. This Italian magazine was the first dedicated to a critical reflection on the editorial production for the young, and knew how to become a medium for the main innovations in the field of children’s literature at national and international level, where the reflection concerning illustrations was gaining momentum. From this point of view, the magazine shaped the discourse around illustration in a forward-looking manner. If, on the one hand, it allowed the work of many early Twentieth-century Italian illustrators to make a name for themselves, anticipating and somehow influencing the first more rigorous studies in the field of iconological research for childhood, on the other hand it was able to welcome in-depth studies and news capable of laying the groundwork for new faces in the field of Italian and foreign illustration to find spaces of expression in the coming years. The paper intends to shed light on some of these reflections, to piece together part of the research space in which – as Faeti argues – «there was a struggle to ensure that whatever was left in the background could be salvaged, a dimension which […] allowed to really understand, not to linger on the surface, or to leave anything in the shadow» (Faeti 2010), defining the magazine as a privileged space for investigation of children’s and young people’s illustration as well. The work of filing and analysing the content published between 1953 and 1970 aims to voice the first critical reflections concerning the relationship between text and images in books, highlighting the evolutionary stages of the discipline, but above all re-evaluating the work of one of the most important magazines of the second half of the Twentieth century in Italy in the field of children’s literature.