Putti Playing with a Barrel and a Mask

Copy after: Andrea Mantegna (in circa 1480-1500)

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Specifications

Title	Putti Playing with a Barrel and a Mask
Material and technique	Pen and brown ink, wash
Object type	Drawing > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Location	This object is in storage

Dimensions	Height 181 mm Width 305 mm
Artists	Copy after: Andrea Mantegna Maker: Anoniem
Accession number	I 252 (PK)
Credits	Loan Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Koenigs collection), 1940
Department	Drawings & Prints
Acquisition date	1940
Creation date	in circa 1480-1500
Collector	Collector / Franz Koenigs
Provenance	Emile Maurice Marignane (1879-1956, L.1872), Paris/Caromb; Franz W. Koenigs (1881-1941, L.1023a), Haarlem, acquired in 1928 (Andrea Mantegna); D.G. van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, acquired with the Koenigs Collection in 1940 and donated to Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Research	Show research Italian Drawings 1400-1600
Literature	London/New York 1992, under no. 149, fig. 113
Material	Brown ink > Ink > Artist's material > Material > Material and technique Pen > Artist's material > Material > Material and technique
Object	Drawing > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Technique	Washing > Wash > Drawing technique > Technique > Material and technique Washing > Wash > Drawing technique > Technique > Material and technique
Geographical origin	Italy > Southern Europe > Europe

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Entry catalogue Italian Drawings 1400-1600

Author: Rosie Razzall

In the centre of this drawing, five putti are climbing on a wooden barrel or trying to roll it along the ground. On the right, two putti are playing with a large mask, and on the left two more are holding hands, with one attempting to flee the scene. Executed in pen and ink with some wash, the drawing is rather weakly drawn. Some contours are reinforced with a thicker pen, giving the drawing the appearance of a copy.

The drawing is related to a similar sheet after Mantegna in Paris,^[1]which also depicts a group of putti playing with masks. The Paris drawing is especially close to the description of a wooden vase in Arcadia, a poem by the humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), written in the 1480s and published in 1504. The decorations on this vase, reportedly carried out by Andrea Mantegna, included two boys also naked, their faces covered with two horrible masks, sticking their little hands through the mouth-holes of the masks to frighten two other children who were standing in front of them. One of them, fleeing, turned round and screamed in fear. The other had already fallen to the ground in tears and, unable to do anything else to help himself, stretched out his hand to scratch the mask.^[2]

The Paris drawing is very likely a copy after the decorations on this now-lost vase, but it is less clear whether the Rotterdam drawing is also based on them. The putti rolling a barrel are absent in Sannazaro’s description, though they would fit iconographically with the ‘vine loaded with ripe grapes’ that ran around the outside of the vase.^[3] The pose of the putto on the far left of our sheet, sinking to his knees and pulling away, and that of the putto closest to the mask who runs off with his leg lifted in the air, are similar to the poses of the two fearful putti in the Paris drawing. It is possible that the Rotterdam drawing is a copy from another variant of the composition by Mantegna that was never used.

The motif of putti playing with masks derives from Hellenistic sources and appears in paintings, friezes and sarcophagi.^[4]Enjoyment of the motif in antiquity stemmed from the incongruity of the tiny child and the aggrandizing falsehoods represented by the mask; it was used, for example, by the Greek satirist Lucian (c.125-after 180) in his Quomodo historia sit scribenda as an ego-puncturing device.^[5]The motif was taken up by various artists in the sixteenth century, and appears on a red chalk drawing by Michelangelo Anselmi (1491/1492-1554/1556) in London.^[6]

Footnotes

^[1]Musée du Louvre, inv. 5072.

^[2] The full passage is as follows: ‘un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto et ingegnosissimo, eran dipinte molte cose: ma tra l’altre una Nimfa ignuda, con tutti i membri bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli de le capre; la quale sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo Satirello, e con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carità tutta si struggesse: e’l fanciullo ne l’una mammella poppava, ne l’altra tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l’occhio la si guardava, quasi temendo che tolta non gli fusse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean duo Fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti duo volti orribili di màscare, cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre spavento a duo altri, che davanti gli stavano; de’ quali l’uno fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava: l’altro caduto già in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimente aitare, stendeva la mano per griaffiarlo. Ma di fuori del vaso correva a torno a torno una vite carica di mature uve : e ne l’un de’ capi di quella un serpe si avolgeva con la coda ; e con la bocca aperta venendo a trovare il labbro del vaso, formava un bellissimo e strano manico da tenerlo’. Sannazaro 1504 (1572), pp. 79-80.

^[3]‘una vite carica di mature uve’, ibidem.

^[4]Kurz 1959, p. 280.

^[5]This is discussed in Kurz 1959, ibidem. ‘When Lucian pokes fun of those historians who write pompous prefaces to their insignificant works, he compares them to “a little child, as one sees Eros who has playfully put on an enormous mask of Herakles or of one of the Titans”.’

^[6]British Museum, inv. 1946,0713.464.

Show research Italian Drawings 1400-1600

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