Two Putti (1700s): Art, History and Details

Two Putti (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This painting depicts two playful putti, or cherub figures. One blows his horn into the other's ears; the other covers his ears to protect them. Now obscured by discolored varnish, the painting once had a greenish-blue background, now a mossy green. The pink flesh tones have turned bronze and the gray horn is now a brassy color. In 1519, Correggio painted playful putti in 16 oval ceiling frescoes in the Camera di San Paolo in Parma, Italy. These frescoes were commissioned by the Abbess Gioanna da Piacenza, as the room was her private quarters in the Benedictine nunnery of San Paolo. After the abbess's death, the house was strictly closed to the public for nearly two centuries. Thus Two Putti may be modeled after sketches of the frescoes made during the Abbess's lifetime, or, after the house reopened to the public, the artist may have admired the frescoes directly and modeled these putti after Correggio's originals.

Object facts

• Title: Two Putti
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 138 x 114 x 10 cm (54 5/16 x 44 7/8 x 3 15/16 in.); Unframed: 103 x 81.5 cm (40 9/16 x 32 1/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.966

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.