Onfim – Medieval Russian Kid’s Art
Usually I spend a lot of time writing about modern and contemporary art, the art market, art theory, and that sort of thing. You know, more or less current concerns relating to art. One thing that I haven’t mentioned before is that I have a Master’s degree in art education and spent many years looking at art made by kids. I find it fascinating how there is a timelessness to many of the representational methods kids use and how their artistic development parallels their cognitive development. One thing that I find particularly interesting is how subject matter changes from generation to generation – kids get their subject matter from their surroundings & contemporary cultural influences. Kids at my daughter’s school make drawings of video game interfaces of their own invention, characters from cartoons they like, or fantasy bedrooms stocked with computers and gaming stations. One might wonder what kids drew in, say, the Middle Ages. Enter Onfim, an approximately 7-year-old Russian boy, alive somewhere between the 12th and 13th century. Kids in medieval Russia learned how to write on scraps of birchbark. Somehow a whole stack of these were preserved and discovered by archaeologists in the 1950’s, including a bunch of drawings by Onfim who apparently enjoyed drawing when he got bored of practicing his letters.
In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do… The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process.
Onfim as a warrior on horseback
Onfim was being taught to write, but he was obviously restless with his lessons and when he could get away with it, he intermixed his assignments with doodlings. In this first example, he started to write out the first eleven letters of the alphabet in the upper right corner, but got bored and drew a picture of himself as a grown-up warrior impaling an enemy with his spear. To remove any doubt about the identity of the warrior, he even labeled the person on the horse as “Onfim.”
Onfim also made drawings of the people in his life, including this great one of his parents:
Onfim’s Mom & Dad
While checking out actual drawings by a little kid from medieval Russia is awesome, what’s really amazing is how kids drawings still look pretty much the same.
If you would like to see more drawings by Onfim you can do so here, or if you’d like to learn more about the excavation in general you can go here (which is also where I got the two images shown here).
