Una forma di poesia verbo-visuale. Randolph Caldecott e l’invenzione del picture book

Between 1878 and 1885 English illustrator Randolph Caldecott produced sixteen slender, elegant volumes animated by nimble figures that represent the beginning of a new way of addressing childhood by weaving words and figures into the space of the page. This brief publishing venture represents the birth of the picture book, a multi-codical textual form destined to have great fortune throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This paper aims to reconstruct and analyze Caldecott’s invention – not coincidentally considered an indispensable reference point by Maurice Sendak, master of the twentieth-century picture book – by showing its cultural relevance in terms of innovation and expressive experimentation in the long and multifaceted path of descending fragments of popular oral culture onto the written page for the use of childhood. This textual form, complex and fascinating, is now widely studied in the international and, more recently, also in the Italian critical context; however, in our country Caldecott’s work has not yet been given due historical-critical attention, perhaps also because of the little fortune his picture books have had in Italy. The focus of the analysis will concern, in particular, four aspects that make Caldecott’s work so relevant in the history of the picture book: the centrality of rhythm; the function that images take on in relation to the verbal text; the characteristic expressive economy of his style, centred on the dominance of the line; finally, the relationship with the reader, which makes the artist a very personal interpreter of a new sensitivity towards childhood and its rights in terms of reading that developed in the Victorian age.