Twee putti 1671 - 1726

This is a print depicting two putti, made by an anonymous artist. The putto is a complicated figure, one that dates all the way back to classical art. In Renaissance and Baroque art, putti were those chubby male children, often winged and nude. They stood in for all sorts of things from the erotic to the cherubic. But consider for a moment what it would mean to be an artist rendering the body, over and over, as this artist must have done. This drawing is a study. The hatching and cross hatching details the muscularity of the figures. But what does it mean to dwell on these small figures, to render them so lovingly? Where does pleasure come into the act of art making? Does the rendering of these idealized bodies signal desire? And if so, for whom? The artist? The patron? Or us, the viewer?