8. Fairy stories for very sophisticated children

Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain. No movement spoke more of children, their simplicity and innocence, or the symbolic significance of children and youth, than did the German Romantics. Yet by the same token, never was such childlike simple-heartedness expressed with greater sophistication or invested with more subliminal meaning. Romantic iconography, as perhaps the most accessible of the movement’s art forms, bears this out. Ph.