Children Deserve Beautiful Things

A young visitor observes the Crucifixion (Michele da Verona. 1501) in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan By Zonapedia - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Walk into almost any space designed for children and you will encounter the same visual assumptions: exaggerated expressions, saccharine colors, cartoon figures, bubbly lettering, and simplified forms. Even when the subject is the Faith, sacred realities are often translated into the language of “kid culture," as though beauty, dignity, and artistic excellence must wait until children are older.

But childhood is precisely when the foundations of taste are being laid.

Children should not be confined to a lesser visual culture simply because they are young. They deserve to hear beautiful music, encounter great works of art, and become familiar with images that communicate truth with skill and reverence. They need instruction suited to their development, certainly, but the models placed before them need not be childish.

Children do not need beauty lowered to them. They need someone to help them look up.

Taste if formed through familiarity

A child’s tastes do not develop in a vacuum. They are shaped by what he repeatedly sees, hears, handles, and learns to value.

The comparison to food is useful. A child accustomed to highly processed, excessively sweet food will naturally develop an appetite for it. More nuanced flavors may initially seem strange or unappealing. A child raised on varied, nourishing food, however, gradually learns to recognize and enjoy subtler qualities.

The same is true of the imagination.

If children hear only simplistic music, complex harmonies may later seem inaccessible. If they encounter art primarily through commercial cartoons, clip art, and disposable craft templates, they may never develop the patience needed to contemplate a more demanding image. Their early exposure does not permanently determine their adult preferences, but it establishes what feels familiar and what they expect art to be.

Research supports what thoughtful parents and teachers have long observed. Exposure to particular styles of painting can increase preschoolers’ preference for those styles, while early encounters with museums and art education can positively shape children’s attitudes toward art. Childhood arts experiences are also associated with continued participation in the arts later in life. [ArtsEdSearch] [National Endowment for the Arts]

We educate taste by giving the eye and ear worthy things upon which to dwell.

A child who regularly hears Gregorian chant, sacred polyphony, classical music, and beautiful hymnody begins to recognize order, variation, harmony, and restraint. He may not be able to explain these qualities, but his ear is being formed by them.

The eye is educated in the same way. A child who encounters icons, illuminated manuscripts, Gothic cathedrals, Baroque paintings, and the ordered patterns of traditional ornament gradually acquires a richer visual vocabulary. He begins to notice proportion, gesture, symbolism, rhythm, luminosity, and composition.

Before children can analyze beauty, they can learn to love it.

Childlike is not the same as childish

Young children naturally delight in bright colors, humor, repetition, and simple forms. There is nothing wrong with an image being cheerful or accessible, nor must every childhood activity possess the solemnity of a cathedral altarpiece.

There is, however, a difference between what is childlike and what is childish.

Childlike work can be simple without being trivial. It can be joyful without being silly, imaginative without being chaotic, and tender without becoming saccharine. A young child can respond deeply to a Madonna and Child, the jeweled colors of a stained-glass window, the animals surrounding the manger, or the golden light of an icon.

Childishness appears when adults assume that children can understand only what is cartoonish, exaggerated, or immediately entertaining. Instead of teaching the child how to approach something greater than himself, the adult remakes everything according to the most limited expectations of childhood.

When this becomes the normal language of Catholic education, the consequences are not merely aesthetic.

If holy figures are consistently presented as cute characters, sacred mysteries as comic scenes, and Catholic symbols as decorations for disposable crafts, children may absorb the idea that the Faith itself belongs to the nursery. As they grow older, they may discard the juvenile visual language and everything they have learned to associate with it.

Cutesy Catholic art is therefore not always as harmless as it appears. A single cheerful craft will not ruin a child’s taste. But a steady diet of trivialized religious imagery can weaken his capacity to recognize grandeur, reverence, sacrifice, mystery, and spiritual authority.

A renewed Christian culture cannot be built upon the visual language of the preschool aisle.

Eero Järnefelt. Portrait of the Artist's Son (Heikki Järnefelt). 1897. Gouache on paper. Google Arts & Culture. Public Domain,

Great art is not beyond children

Adults sometimes withhold masterworks because they fear children will find them difficult or intimidating. Yet children are often more receptive to serious things than we expect, especially when an attentive adult helps them look.

A child does not need a university lecture on Fra Angelico before seeing one of his Annunciations. He can notice the angel’s posture, the Virgin’s crossed hands, the enclosed garden, the golden light, and the stillness of the encounter.

He does not need to understand every theological dimension of a Byzantine icon before recognizing that it asks to be approached differently from a cartoon. He can observe the solemn gaze, the blessing hand, the gold ground, the inscriptions, and the deliberate arrangement of the figures.

He can listen for a returning melody in a classical composition. He can search a cathedral façade for saints, animals, flowers, and geometric patterns. He can trace the lines of a master drawing, copy a border from an illuminated manuscript, or compare the expressions in two paintings of the Nativity.

The teacher’s task is not to remove everything difficult. It is to provide a point of entry.

Children can encounter the greatest works of Christian culture at the level appropriate to them without reducing those works to something lesser. A six-year-old and a scholar may notice different things in a Giotto fresco, but the fresco is worthy of both.

Earlier artists were entrusted with serious work

The artistic accomplishments of earlier generations reveal how much young people can learn when they are surrounded by excellent models, sustained practice, and skilled instruction.

During the earlier periods of art education, artistic training commonly began between the ages of seven and fifteen. Apprentices entered workshops where they learned by observing a master, preparing materials, copying established works, practicing techniques, receiving correction, and gradually participating in serious commissions. This formation ordinarily continued for years.

Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony, his earliest known painting, was created when he was only twelve or thirteen. Although based upon an engraving by Martin Schongauer, the young artist studied natural forms and introduced his own observations into the painting. I would argue that Michelangelo's work did not surpass the mastery of Schongauer, himself a well-renowned master engraver and artist of his time who inspired Renaissance artists and also Dürer. However, the work displays a level of technical control and visual seriousness that many people today would scarcely expect from a university student, much less a child barely a teenager.

The lesson is not that every twelve-year-old should produce a masterpiece. Nor should we romanticize every feature of an earlier apprenticeship system.

The lesson is that young people often rise in response to what is expected of them.

[Left] Michelangelo. The Torment of Saint Anthony. 1487. Tempera on panel. - Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, United States. Public Domain. [Right] Martin Schongauer. Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. 1470-74. Engraving. The Met. Public Domain.

Earlier artists were not formed by endless novelty or encouraged to believe that instruction would inhibit their creativity. They were given worthy models, taught how to use their materials, required to practice, and corrected by people who knew more than they did. Imitation came before innovation. Skill made greater freedom possible.

Today, students are often given abundant permission to “express themselves” while being denied the training necessary to express anything well. Low expectations are then mistaken for kindness.

A child does not benefit from being told that every spontaneous mark is equally successful. He benefits from discovering that attention, practice, patience, and correction allow him to do what he could not do before.

Beautiful models give children something to aspire toward

Great works of art teach humility without humiliation.

Standing before a masterwork, a child encounters something beyond his present ability. That distance need not discourage him. Properly taught, it awakens admiration: A human being learned to do this. Perhaps I can learn more than I can do now.

This is one of the gifts that the high culture of Christendom offers children. It places excellence before them without pretending that excellence is effortless. It shows them that they are heirs to a tradition they did not invent and invites them to receive, preserve, and eventually contribute to it.

Christian education especially needs this upward orientation.

The true, the good, and the beautiful call the person beyond appetite, impulse, and self-assertion. Sacred art directs the eye beyond the object toward the reality signified. It teaches that creation possesses order, that materials should be treated with care, that symbols carry inherited meaning, and that beauty can be offered in the service of God.

Children need images that enlarge their imaginations: the heavenly order of an iconostasis, the colored light of a rose window, the quiet tenderness of the Virgin and Child, the solemnity of the Crucifixion, and the radiant victory of the Resurrection.

Such works give visible form to realities greater than the self. They help children understand that the world did not begin with them, that holiness is worthy of reverence, and that their own work can be directed toward something higher than entertainment or self-display.

France, Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, the Apocalypse in Flamboyant tracery. By Didier B (Sam67fr) - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5.

Forming the makers of a Christian culture

A Christian culture is not produced by religious messaging alone. It is expressed through the things Christians make: churches, paintings, vestments, books, music, homes, schools, public ceremonies, and ordinary objects of daily life: spritualis sub metaphoris corporalium. (Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 9)

The adults who will shape that culture are children now.

If we want them to build beautiful churches, commission worthy sacred art, preserve traditional crafts, sing the Church’s music, and recognize artistic excellence, we must begin educating their tastes while they are young. We cannot feed them a visual diet dominated by novelty, sentimentality, and commercial “kid appeal,” then expect a mature Christian culture to appear automatically in adulthood.

This does not mean eliminating delight from childhood. On the contrary, children should experience the joy of color, pattern, storytelling, making, singing, and discovery. But their delight should open outward toward wonder, not close in upon silliness.

At Ars Fidelium, our sequential K–12 Catholic art curriculum forms children through prayer, observation of nature, geometry and proportion, theology, and the study of masterworks. They are introduced to the Church’s artistic inheritance not because we expect them to work like mature masters, but because we believe their eyes and imaginations are worthy of formation.

The aim is not to make childhood prematurely adult. It is to refuse to make childhood culturally small.

Children deserve instruction suited to their age. They also deserve the finest things their civilization and their Faith have given them. They deserve to be taken seriously, challenged patiently, and placed in the presence of what is holy, skillful, and beautiful.

When we give children worthy things to love, we give them something toward which they can grow.

Related: What Distinguishes Sacred-Art Formation from Catholic-Themed Crafts?