The other night I came across a picture that really shocked me. It is of a man killing another man with a bucket. His face contorted in a snarl, he swings the bucket, hitting his victim on the forehead with lethal results.
Horrible stuff ... for a children's book. What, you say? What wicked symptom of our times is this? Oh, hold on.
I came across the painting of Captain Kidd murdering a mutineer in my dog-eared 1970s copy of a Ladybird Book of Pirates. My childhood signature is in it, and the pictures are burned into my memory – especially the one of pirate Anne Bonney, for some reason.
But what a violent book: in addition to the bucket murder, it portrays Blackbeard roaring his rage while flames surge around him, and pirates' victims tied to the mast while they are tortured.
Other happy memories of the huge collection of Ladybird books I amassed include an apocalyptic scene of Drake setting fire to Cadiz, and bloodsoaked biographies of Nelson and Napoleon.
Some of these books are still in my possession. But one I can only describe from memory contained Lives of the Artists. That one told how the young Leonardo da Vinci created a monster in his room by sticking together bits of dead animals – composing his collection of snakes, crickets, bats and other strange creatures into a hybrid beast whose picture he painted on a shield.
This image of the young Da Vinci comes from Vasari's 16th-century biography of him; and Caravaggio was surely competing with it, or paying homage to it, when he painted his Medusa shield. Leonardo's monster fascinated me then, and it still does.
Anyway ... what books those 1970s Ladybirds were to give to a child. Fantastic. I still have another volume of their artists' lives: it features Rubens and Rembrandt. Those are not as memorable though – not enough murders or monsters.
