Trying to picture God himself is an actual introduction to abstract art for some people. Crib scenes and pictures help to show and explain the Nativity crucifixion scenes show, in a devastating image, what happened to the baby when he grew up. It was there as a visual aid for the priest to use to explain what was going to happen on the Last Day. Many churches, even quite small ones, have a wall decorated with a portrayal of the Last Judgement (or “the Doom”) which must have had exactly the same function as the posters in a primary school. Only, if it’s about some element of religion, it’s not regarded as a story, but the truth and a major second problem is that many of the truths of religion are not easily shown in the form of pictures. What about holy pictures? Through all the centuries when literacy was only for a favoured few, pictures were a powerful way to tell a story. For these books, changing the illustrations seems unthinkable, except then it happens, and some people seem unaccountably to prefer the new version (Winnie the Pooh, for example, but I personally don’t wish to see any differently-illustrated version of (say) The Tiger that came to Tea, and the family refused flatly to go to the film version of The Little White Horse). But I love children’s picture books, where the pictures are a balanced half of the narrative (choose your own favourites here). I’m not keen on illustrations for adult books just as I prefer radio to television because the pictures are better, I prefer my imaginings to other people’s. Some must have enjoyed them, and every new reader is a good thing, surely. I remember there was a kerfuffle when someone repackaged Jane Austen as if her books were chick lit, presumably to entice a different group of readers I wonder how far some of them persevered with the books. We have more tolerance over different illustrations for stories like fairy tales, where we know that different people will draw them differently and we are exposed to different versions from an early age, but some people get very agitated when a beloved book is republished with new illustrations, or even just new cover art. If you read a book first in pure text form, and have your own mental pictures of its events, you are more likely to object to some later illustrator’s conceptions, because yours will be more authoritative for you. When the children were little, we had a rule that if we were going to see a film based on a book, they had to have read the book first, before seeing the film. Some of the impact that a book illustration can have is down to timing. You can tell a story in pictures alone, in words and pictures, or in words alone, but the popularity of pictures even in books for grownups (the Folio Society, cover art on paperbacks) is hard to deny. Picture books, from the quasi-factual to the fantastic, help us to build, shape and organise our mental world from when we are very small. If this weren’t true, we would not have advertisements and illustrations. And the effect is much quicker than reading the thousand words and a good picture stays with you. A picture is worth a thousand words, we are told, and certainly it can have enormous impact.
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