Putti Playing with a Barrel and a Mask

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]