Recreation in the Renaissance

Varieties of Pastimes 101
games, though, have to be appropriate, and not simply in the sense that
they need to avoid anything morally reprehensible. Following the
model set in Classical Antiquity, young, robust men need to exercise
their body and each of their limbs. Sitting-down games like chess are
good for elderly people affected by the gout. ‘Let girls sit and grow lazy.’
Horse-riding, archery, fencing, swimming and ball games are appropriate
for boys; later in their lives, they would regret not having learned
those skills. 31
In Mulcaster’s aforementioned Positions (see above, Chapter 3), physical
education played a paramount role. As well as discussing general
rules concerning exercise, and the exercise of the voice (Of lowd speaking,
Of loude singing, Of loude and soft reading, Of much talking and
silence, Of laughing and weeping, Of holding the breath), the book
devotes a significant series of chapters to specific sports (Of daunsing,
Of wrastling, Of fensing, Of the top and scourge, Of walking, Of
running, Of leaping, Of swimming, Of riding, Of hunting, Of shooting,
Of the ball). The text offers thus a virtually unprecedented panorama
of games which were regarded as appropriate for Tudor children,
although it appears somehow bookish: the selection does not seem to
be particularly targeted at young persons, and the humanist reliance on
classical sources and models is still overwhelming. 32 The ‘Saletta dei
giuochi’ in Ferrara (see above, Chapter 3) offers the visual representation
of a similar selection of children’s games, strongly oriented by a
humanist programme and a set of allegorical meanings. It reproduces
the range of activities that were typical of an ancient school (gymnasium,
or ludus), with its characteristic pursuit of a harmonic balance
between body and mind. It has been noticed that some of the scenes
that would appear more problematic for an educational purpose, such
as the gladiatorial contest, do not in fact depict a real fight, but rather
a mock one performed as a form of exercise, or a dance miming the
contest (the musicians playing in a corner being common in treatises
of education as a specific requirement for that form of training). The
presence in the panels of the figure of the tutor supervising the exercise
also confirms that we are looking at scenes from a school. Other children’s
games represented in the same room – spinning-top and skittles
– had a philosophical, neo-Platonic tradition of allegorical meaning. 33
There is a whole distinctive Flemish and Dutch tradition of representing
children’s games systematically in paintings and prints, either
in a series of separate images or in an anthology of different games displayed
as simultaneous, the latter fashion represented at its best by
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s well-known Children’s Games (1560) (Figure
6.2). As with Ferrara, as the case of Bruegel clearly shows, the visual