Recreation in the Renaissance

100 Recreation in the Renaissance
musician in the background); whereas reading is an action represented
as performed by a man to a woman, who is spinning (could she read
What else does the picture suggest about their relationship). 28 That this
iconographic tradition also evidently represents a socially exclusive
milieu is even more evident in a cycle of Months, frescoed at the beginning
of the fifteenth century on commission of a prince bishop of Trent
in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, where the aristocratic pastimes are
performed against a background of peasants’ labours. 29
If gender roles were mirrored and, more significantly, reinforced
through gendered forms of recreation, this did not entirely stop people
from playing the games with which they were not socially expected to
engage. Nevertheless, the invasion of each other’s role would not have
gone unnoticed, and was likely to become the target of moral critique
and/or satire. In Erasmus’ dialogue on ‘Knuckelbones, or the game of
tali’ one of the (male) interlocutors, after noticing that the gambling
game in question is also practised by women, adds that it is going out
of fashion, ‘scorned even by girls today; they take up dice, cards, and
other masculine amusements instead’. 30
Children’s games
As a masterpiece in the literary genre of Latin dialogues, written and
widely adopted as a school text, Erasmus’s Colloquies help attracting our
attention to a third factor. Age is another obviously relevant variable,
with youth playing an important, although not exclusive, part in the
world of pastimes, and moralists and physicians alike warning adults
and the elderly against activities inappropriate to their status, if not
openly counterproductive to their well-being. Children’s games are constantly
one of the elements that contribute to the picture; however, they
do not constitute a very frequent subject of moral reflection, since the
protagonist of ethics is by definition the fully developed and responsible
human being. Maturity needs to be socially promoted and achieved:
education is therefore a key ground for the transmission of accepted
values, including recreational habits.
The humanist ideal of education marked a milestone in the perception
and practice of play within the European pedagogic tradition.
Grounded in the classical model of a balance between mental and
physical development, physical exercise was regarded as a necessary
formative step, as well as a required recreation needed for relief from
prolonged periods of study. In Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia
(written in the 1430s), Lionardo, the protagonist patriarch, specifies that
he does not want children to be ‘always locked up with books’. Their