ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the child as a reclining putto, a type which later evolved into the reclining putto and skull. Regardless of personal feelings, the fact remains that, apart from Poland, relatively few monuments were erected to commemorate children in the sixteenth century and those that were had no distinctive iconography: children were depicted either as swaddled or presented as small adults. In order to elucidate why the tradition of commemorating children arose in Poland and nowhere else, it considers attitude towards children in general during this period and within the family in particular; this will include a consideration of family structuring, particularly gendered structuring, as well as child death and commemoration. The particular form of sleeping putto, reclining and propped, increased emotional involvement through Polish folk art by evoking the popular motif of the melancholy or sorrowful Christ.
