Marks, Inscriptions, and Distinguishing Features
None
Entry
Note
1. This work’s documented history goes back only to the mid-twentieth century when it was imported into the United States from an unknown location. See the Provenance section of this entry. The original has been in the Medici collections since 1667, and still today belongs today to the Uffizi Galleries in Florence (fig. 1).
Note
2. See Jean Sorabella,"Eros and the Lizard: Children, Animals, and Roman Funerary Sculpture,” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 41 (2007): 353-370. The Statuette of a Sleeping Cupid, 50–100 CE, in the collection of the Getty Museum is one such example (fig. 2). As a subject for ancient literature, it is found in humorous reflections on human love, as in the epigram “On Love Asleep” attributed to Statyllius Flaccus (lived in first century BCE):
Note
3. Translation from Greek Anthology, Loeb ed., vol. V, 285; cited in Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 256 n. 25, and Anthony Colantuono, “Caravaggio’s Literary Culture,” “Caravaggio’s Literary Culture,” in Genevieve Warwick, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 57–68, 61.
Note
4. Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251-257. The resulting sculpture, now lost, fooled many experts of his era into thinking it was an antique, so strong was its resemblance to ancient prototypes such as the one now in the Uffizi (fig. 3), perhaps the very sculpture once in the Medici sculpture garden.5
Note
5. On the Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi, see Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010) 2nd edition, cat. no. 51; see also Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 296. For the suggestion that Michelangelo’s model was the sculpture now in the Uffizi, see Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 256. Cesare Borgia, Guidobaldo da Montefeltre, and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) were among those deceived by Michelangelo’s imitation. Through the latter’s purchase, Michelangelo’s sculpture was brought from Urbino to Matua in 1502, where it remained at least until 1627, whence it was purchased for the collections of King Charles I of England.6
Note
6. Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 251.
Note
7. On the first, lost, and little-known Sleeping Cupid made in Rome, see Genevieve Warwick, “Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,” Art History 40 (Sept., 2017): 884–903, esp. 886–887. He had already won fame for his stunningly realistic image of a sassy, frolicking cupid known as Amor Vincit Omnia Omnia (or Cupid as Victor) (fig. 4), painted in 1602 and now in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.
Note
8. See Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212. Caravaggio’s artistic success in Rome was undermined by his own irascible nature. In 1606, after the painter killed Ranuccio Tomassoni (about 1580–1606), a well-connected Roman citizen, he fled to Naples, where he found protection under Costanza Colonna, the widow of Francesco Sforza. He then made his way in 1607 to the island of Malta, where Costanza’s son Fabrizio was a naval general in the religious Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Knights of Malta. Aiming to obtain knighthood himself, the artist saw this elevation of his status as a possible pathway to obtaining a papal pardon for the murder of Tomassoni.9
Note
9. Catherine Puglisi, “Caravaggio’s Life and Lives Over Four Centuries,” in Genevieve Warwick, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 23–35, esp. 30.
Note
10. The Uffizi’s Sleeping Cupid is in poor condition according to Sybille Ebert Schifferer [Caravaggio. The Artist and His Work (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 219], who notes “extreme abrasion of the surface, particularly on the areas of the skin, where much of the dark ground is showing through.” Caravaggio’s patron for this work was Francesco dell’Antella (1567-1624), a Knight of Malta who hailed from Florence, where he had been a gentleman member of Florence’s Accademia del Disegno and a friend of the Buonarroti family, and where he would eventually carry out the prestigious role of maggiordomo maggiore at the court of Grand Duke Cosimo II de' Medici.11
Note
11. Ludovica Sebregondi Fiorentini, “Francesco dell’Antella, Caravaggio, Paladini e altri,” Paragone, nos. 383–85 (1982): 107–122, esp. 113. Shortly after the painting was completed in 1608, the patron sent it to his brother in Florence. It had certainly left the island by 20 July 1609, the date that Fra Francesco Buonarroti (1574–1632), a Knight of Malta since 1599 as well as the nephew of the famous sculptor, wrote from Malta to his brother in Florence, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, saying that “a painting by the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, representing a sleeping Cupid” had been sent to the dell’Antella home in the Tuscan capital and that Francesco dell’Antella wanted very much for him [Francesco Buonarroti] to see it. Francesco dell’Antella further incited Francesco Buonarroti’s curiosity by showing him sonnets about the painting that had been written by those who already had seen it in Malta.12
Note
12. “[…] un quadro di mano di Michelangelo da Caravaggio, dentrovi un Cupido che dorme […].” Archivio Buonarroti, filza 104, fol. 145r, letter from Fra Francesco Buonarroti to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, Malta, 20 July 1609; first published in Ludovica Sebregondi Fiorentini, “Francesco dell’Antella, Caravaggio, Paladini e altri,” Paragone, nos. 383–385 (1982): 107–122, esp. 122. By 24 July 1609, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger had sent to Francesco dell’Antella his own adulatory reaction to Caravaggio’s painting after seeing it installed in Palazzo dell’Antella in Florence.13
Note
13. Archivio Buonarroti, filza 46, fol. 756r, Letter from Fra Francesco dell’Antella to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, Malta, 24 July 1609; first published in David M. Stone, “The Context of Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John in Malta,” The Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1128 (1997): 161–170, esp. 168.
Note
14. Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’, (Rome: Newton & Compton editori, 1987), entry no. 85. Notably, that autobiographical interpretation extended to the artist himself, since Caravaggio had recently taken his own vow of celibacy on the pathway to being received into the Order of Malta on 14 July 1608. (He was expelled from the Order shortly thereafter, on 1 December 1608).
Note
15. Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 149, following Avigdor W.G. Posèq, “Caravaggio and the Antique,” Artibus et Historiae 11, no. 21 (1990): 147–167. Caravaggio was indeed called “Michelangelo” in Malta, signing his Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608) for the Knights’ Oratory at the Co-Cathedral of St. John in Valletta with the formula “f. Michelang.” On this signature, see David Stone, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Politics of Blood,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (December 2012): 272–293. This theory is corroborated by dell’Antella’s well-documented efforts to encourage the sculptor’s kinsmen, namely the above-mentioned brothers, Fra Francesco Buonarroti and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, to view his painting. Of additional relevance to this theory is the fact that the Florentine Sleeping Cupid once bore references to Michelangelo’s sleeping figure of Night in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence. As shown by x-ray photography, at an early stage of that painting, the composition included the additional attributes of a poppy in Cupid’s right hand and an owl behind his stomach.16
Note
16. Mina Gregori, ed., Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Come nascono i capolavori, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti and Rome: Palazzo Ruspoli/Milan: Electa, 1991), entry no. 19. For a deeper consideration of poppies and the iconography of sleeping Cupid figures in art, see Genevieve Warwick, “Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,” Art History 40 (Sept., 2017): 892–896. Both of these attributes appear prominently in Michelangelo’s Night.
Note
17. William E. Wallace, Michelangelo. The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 244–245. In light of the tentative links between Michelangelo’s Night and Caravaggio’s painting Sleeping Cupid in its early phase with the owl and poppies still visible, we might wonder if the sleeping child by the “modern Michelangelo” was perhaps intended by dell’Antella to allude to a dormant but ever-ready spirit of Florentine republicanism, ready to use its weapons upon waking. It may indeed be the case that Francesco dell’Antella used the painting to signal his anti-Medici sentiment, given that some historians have seen a Florentine patrician’s entrance into the Order of Malta as an act of resistance to the Medici regime.18
Note
18. Angelantonio Spagnoletti, Stato, aristocrazie e ordine di Malta nell’Italia moderna (Bari: Università degli Studi, Rome: Ecole français de Rome, 1988), 33, 77–78. Spagnoletti points out that, among Florentines, joining the Order of Santo Stefano was a sign of fidelity to the Medici regime; to join the rival Order was to flout their regime. Historian Elisa Johanna Goudriaan [“The Cultural Importance of Florentine Patricians. Cultural Exchange, Brokerage Networks, and Social Representation in Early Modern Florence and Rome (1600–1660),” Ph.D. Diss., University of Leiden (2015), 50], believes that the preference for the Order of Malta originated instead in the wish to demonstrate one’s superior aristocratic lineage, yet this ignores the fact that even uomini nuovi of common birth could gain admission to the Maltese Order by means of a commenda. Even Niccolò dell’Antella, despite being an advisor and key member of the Medici government, represented a kind of opposition to the Medici’s fullest claims to political power, having written strongly in favor of the role of the Senate in the distribution of powers, even if it was only a theoretical position. See Carlo Vivoli, “Niccolò dell’Antella,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 37 (Roma: Treccani, 1989), sub voce.
Note
19. Claudio Pizzorusso [“Caravaggio contromano. Episodi di naturalismo nella Toscana Fiorentina,” in Alessandro Zuccari, ed., I Caravaggeschi. Percorsi e protagonisti (Milan: Skira Editore, 2010), vol. 1, 179–191, 180] notes that changes to the setting of the sleeping Cupid in Giovanni da San Giovanni’s fresco gave it the nature of an “iconographic rebus” and he notes the motto “Tranquilitas animi” written on a drapery in the foreground. This hidden meaning may have had political undertones. The Medici finally had the opportunity to purchase the Sleeping Cupid in 1667 upon the death of the childless Donato di Niccolò dell’Antella, whose entire estate was bequeathed as a testamentary gift to the Church of the Santissima Annunziata.
Note
20. Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118. (The Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi measures 72 × 105 cm, while the Clowes painting is only slightly smaller in its vertical dimension: 65.8 × 104.8 cm.) In cases where a copy and the original share such similarity in size, this can indicate that the copy was intended to fill the vacancy left when the owner of the more valuable original was reluctantly obliged to gift or sell his original. We can exclude that scenario in the case of the Clowes painting, since the dell’Antella never parted with their painting so long as their family line was in existence. The making of a copy was therefore undertaken to satisfy the desire of someone who admired the original and who was on good enough standing with the dell’Antella to obtain their permission to have a copy made, a situation that necessarily required the dell’Antella to allow the artist who had been commissioned with the copy to have direct access to the original for an extended time.
Note
21. Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118. The name of Orazio Fidani (1610–after 1656) can be eliminated from the possible candidates, because his copy (76.8 × 102.2 cm), which is not only signed but also dated “1632,” bears none of the individuating traits noted in the paragraph above.22
Note
22. On Fidani’s painting, see Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118.
Note
23. The fullest account of her patronage in Florence is in Sheila Barker, “Artemisia’s Money. The Entrepreneurship of a Woman Artist in Seventeenth-Century Florence,” in Sheila Barker, ed., Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2017), 59–88; and Sheila Barker, Artemisia Gentileschi (London: Lund Humphries; Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2022), chap. 2. Moreover, she enjoyed fame in Florence for her ability to imitate Caravaggio’s style, as we know from a biography written during her stay in the city that elaborates on her early debut as a highly paid and much-admired copyist of Caravaggio.24
Note
24. Sheila Barker, “The First Biography of Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-Fashioning and Proto-Feminist Art History in Cristofano Bronzini’s Notes on Women Artists,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 60, no. 3 (2018): 404–435. A few years later and in any case before 1627, Artemisia is known to have made an original painting of the subject, known as the Amoretto (Sleeping Cupid). Her rendition was seen and celebrated in Venice, triggering a laudatory anonymous poem now associated with the Venetian literary academician Gianfrancesco Loredan (1607–1661).25
Note
25. R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 355–356.
Author
Provenance
Possibly a private collection or convent in Ireland.26Note
26. Ireland is first mentioned as a possible previous location for the painting by Friedlaender, who attributed the painting to Caravaggio; see Friedlaender expertise, December 1948, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.
Ivan N. Podgoursky (1901-1962), New York and Boston, by 1948;27Note
27. See agreements between Clowes and Podgoursky, 1951–1952, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.
G.H.A. Clowes, Indianapolis, in 1951–1952;28Note
28. Clowes bought the painting in installments beginning in November 1951; see agreements between Clowes and Podgoursky, 1951–1952, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.
Exhibitions
John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis, 1959, Paintings from the Collection of George Henry Alexander Clowes: A Memorial Exhibition, no. 13 (reproduced);
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, 1962, Italian and Spanish Paintings from the Clowes Collection, no. 22;
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, 1965, Art in Italy, 1600–1700, no. 4;
Wildenstein and Co., New York, 1968–1969, Gods and Heroes—Baroque Images of Antiquity, no. 3;
Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2000–2001, Il Cinquecento Lombardo. Da Leonardo a Caravaggio, no. IX.4;
Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, 2006, Caravaggio: Auf den Spuren eines Genies, no. 2;
Salander-O’Reilly, New York, 2007–2008, Caravaggio, no. 6;
Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou, China; Hunan Museum, Changsha, China; Chengdu Museum; 2020–2021, Rembrandt to Monet: 500 Years of European Painting.
References
Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 212, no. 38B, pl. 54;
Paintings from the Collection of George Henry Alexander Clowes, exh. cat. (Indianapolis: John Herron Art Museum, 1959), no. 13;
André Berne-Joffroy, Le dossier Caravage (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1959), 340–342;
René Jullian, Caravage (Lyon: IAC, 1961), 186, 194 (note 21), 230;
Italian and Spanish Paintings from the Clowes Collection, exh. cat. (Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, 1962), no. 22;
Art in Italy, 1600–1700, exh. cat. (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1965), 26–27, no. 4;
Howard Hibbard and Milton Lewine, “Seicento at Detroit,” The Burlington Magazine 107, no. 748 (July 1965): 371;
Michael Kitson, The Complete Paintings of Caravaggio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967), 106–107;
Alfred Moir, The Italian Followers of Caravaggio (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:212 (note 3).
Gods and Heroes—Baroque Images of Antiquity, exh. cat. (New York: Wildenstein and Co, 1968–69) no. 3, fig. 15.
Evelina Borea, Caravaggio e Caravaggeschi nelle Gallerie di Firenze (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), 6;
Luigi Salerno, “Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi,” Storia dell’arte 7/8 (1970): 236, 241;
A. Ian Fraser, A Catalogue of the Clowes Collection (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), xxvii, 42–43;
Maurizio Marini, Io Michelangelo da Caravaggio (Rome: Studio B di Bestetti e Bozzi, 1973–1974), 248, 441;
Giorgio Fulco, “Ammirate l’altissimo pittore: Caravaggio nelle rime inedite di Marzio Milesi,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 10 (1976): 76, no. 10;
Alfred Moir, Caravaggio and His Copyists (New York: New York University Press for the College Art Association of America, 1976), 8, 102, no.42d;
Anthony F. Janson and A. Ian Fraser, 100 Masterpieces of Painting (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1980), 63–65;
Mia Cinotti, Michelangelo Merisi detto il Caravaggio: Tutte le opera (Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 1983), 433;
Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio “pictor praestantissimus”: la tragica esistenza, la raffinate cultura… (Rome: Newton, 1987), 284, 530, 532;
Avigdor W.G. Posèq, “A Note on Caravaggio’s Sleeping Amor,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 6, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 27, 31;
Avigdor W.G. Posèq,” Caravaggio and the Antique,” Artibus et Historiae 11, no. 21 (1990): 161;
Flavio Caroli, Il Cinquecento Lombardo – da Leonardo a Caravaggio, exh.cat. (Milan: Skira, 2000), no. IX.4 (by Maurizio Marini);
Karen Michels, “‘Pineapple and Mayonnaise—Why Not?': European Art Historians Meet the New World,” in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, ed. Michel F. Zimmermann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 64, fig. 7 (photograph of Walter Friedlaender lecturing at NYU with Sleeping Cupid on an easel in his classroom, date unknown, possibly 1951);
Caravaggio: The Final Years, exh. cat. (London: The National Gallery, 2005), 116–118;
David M. Stone, “‘Fra Michelangelo’ and the Art of Knighthood,” in Keith Sciberras and David M. Stone, Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood and Malta (Valletta: University of Malta, 2006), 84–85;
Jürgen Harten and Jean-Hubert Martin, eds., Caravaggio: Originale und Kopien im Spiegel der Forschung, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), no. 2, 112, 206–207;
Edward Clark, ed., Caravaggio, exh. cat. (New York: Salander-O’Reilly in association with Whitfield Fine Art London, 2007), 70, no. 6 (reproduced);
Genevieve Warwick, “Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,” Art History 40, no. 4 (September 2017): 901 (note 9) DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12345.
Kjell M. Wangensteen et al., Rembrandt to Monet: 500 Years of European Painting (Nanjing: Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing, 2020), 76–77 (reproduced);
Kjell M. Wangensteen et al., Floating Lights and Shadows: 500 Years of European Painting (Nanjing: Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing, 2020), 74–75 (reproduced).
Notes
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This work’s documented history goes back only to the mid-twentieth century when it was imported into the United States from an unknown location. See the Provenance section of this entry. ↩︎
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See Jean Sorabella,"Eros and the Lizard: Children, Animals, and Roman Funerary Sculpture,” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 41 (2007): 353-370. ↩︎
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Translation from Greek Anthology, Loeb ed., vol. V, 285; cited in Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 256 n. 25, and Anthony Colantuono, “Caravaggio’s Literary Culture,” “Caravaggio’s Literary Culture,” in Genevieve Warwick, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 57–68, 61. ↩︎
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Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251-257. ↩︎
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On the Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi, see Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010) 2nd edition, cat. no. 51; see also Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 296. For the suggestion that Michelangelo’s model was the sculpture now in the Uffizi, see Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 256. ↩︎
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Paul F. Norton, “The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec., 1957): 251–257, 251. ↩︎
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On the first, lost, and little-known Sleeping Cupid made in Rome, see Genevieve Warwick, “Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,” Art History 40 (Sept., 2017): 884–903, esp. 886–887. ↩︎
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See Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212. ↩︎
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Catherine Puglisi, “Caravaggio’s Life and Lives Over Four Centuries,” in Genevieve Warwick, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 23–35, esp. 30. ↩︎
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The Uffizi’s Sleeping Cupid is in poor condition according to Sybille Ebert Schifferer [Caravaggio. The Artist and His Work (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 219], who notes “extreme abrasion of the surface, particularly on the areas of the skin, where much of the dark ground is showing through.” ↩︎
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Ludovica Sebregondi Fiorentini, “Francesco dell’Antella, Caravaggio, Paladini e altri,” Paragone, nos. 383–85 (1982): 107–122, esp. 113. ↩︎
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“[…] un quadro di mano di Michelangelo da Caravaggio, dentrovi un Cupido che dorme […].” Archivio Buonarroti, filza 104, fol. 145r, letter from Fra Francesco Buonarroti to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, Malta, 20 July 1609; first published in Ludovica Sebregondi Fiorentini, “Francesco dell’Antella, Caravaggio, Paladini e altri,” Paragone, nos. 383–385 (1982): 107–122, esp. 122. ↩︎
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Archivio Buonarroti, filza 46, fol. 756r, Letter from Fra Francesco dell’Antella to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, Malta, 24 July 1609; first published in David M. Stone, “The Context of Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John in Malta,” The Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1128 (1997): 161–170, esp. 168. ↩︎
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Maurizio Marini, Caravaggio: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’, (Rome: Newton & Compton editori, 1987), entry no. 85. ↩︎
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Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 149, following Avigdor W.G. Posèq, “Caravaggio and the Antique,” Artibus et Historiae 11, no. 21 (1990): 147–167. Caravaggio was indeed called “Michelangelo” in Malta, signing his Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608) for the Knights’ Oratory at the Co-Cathedral of St. John in Valletta with the formula “f. Michelang.” On this signature, see David Stone, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Politics of Blood,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (December 2012): 272–293. ↩︎
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Mina Gregori, ed., Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Come nascono i capolavori, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti and Rome: Palazzo Ruspoli/Milan: Electa, 1991), entry no. 19. For a deeper consideration of poppies and the iconography of sleeping Cupid figures in art, see Genevieve Warwick, “Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608,” Art History 40 (Sept., 2017): 892–896. ↩︎
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William E. Wallace, Michelangelo. The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 244–245. ↩︎
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Angelantonio Spagnoletti, Stato, aristocrazie e ordine di Malta nell’Italia moderna (Bari: Università degli Studi, Rome: Ecole français de Rome, 1988), 33, 77–78. Spagnoletti points out that, among Florentines, joining the Order of Santo Stefano was a sign of fidelity to the Medici regime; to join the rival Order was to flout their regime. Historian Elisa Johanna Goudriaan [“The Cultural Importance of Florentine Patricians. Cultural Exchange, Brokerage Networks, and Social Representation in Early Modern Florence and Rome (1600–1660),” Ph.D. Diss., University of Leiden (2015), 50], believes that the preference for the Order of Malta originated instead in the wish to demonstrate one’s superior aristocratic lineage, yet this ignores the fact that even uomini nuovi of common birth could gain admission to the Maltese Order by means of a commenda. Even Niccolò dell’Antella, despite being an advisor and key member of the Medici government, represented a kind of opposition to the Medici’s fullest claims to political power, having written strongly in favor of the role of the Senate in the distribution of powers, even if it was only a theoretical position. See Carlo Vivoli, “Niccolò dell’Antella,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 37 (Roma: Treccani, 1989), sub voce. ↩︎
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Claudio Pizzorusso [“Caravaggio contromano. Episodi di naturalismo nella Toscana Fiorentina,” in Alessandro Zuccari, ed., I Caravaggeschi. Percorsi e protagonisti (Milan: Skira Editore, 2010), vol. 1, 179–191, 180] notes that changes to the setting of the sleeping Cupid in Giovanni da San Giovanni’s fresco gave it the nature of an “iconographic rebus” and he notes the motto “Tranquilitas animi” written on a drapery in the foreground. This hidden meaning may have had political undertones. ↩︎
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Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118. ↩︎
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Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118. ↩︎
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On Fidani’s painting, see Ludovica Sebregondi, “Cupido che dorme,” in Gianni Papi, ed., Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Pitti/Florence: Giunti, 2010), entry no. 6, 116–118, 118. ↩︎
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The fullest account of her patronage in Florence is in Sheila Barker, “Artemisia’s Money. The Entrepreneurship of a Woman Artist in Seventeenth-Century Florence,” in Sheila Barker, ed., Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2017), 59–88; and Sheila Barker, Artemisia Gentileschi (London: Lund Humphries; Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2022), chap. 2. ↩︎
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Sheila Barker, “The First Biography of Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-Fashioning and Proto-Feminist Art History in Cristofano Bronzini’s Notes on Women Artists,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 60, no. 3 (2018): 404–435. ↩︎
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R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 355–356. ↩︎
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Ireland is first mentioned as a possible previous location for the painting by Friedlaender, who attributed the painting to Caravaggio; see Friedlaender expertise, December 1948, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.
A “convent in Ireland” is mentioned in A. Ian Fraser, A Catalogue of the Clowes Collection (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), xxvii. Neither has been verified. However, the painting had been overpainted
Definition
A layer of paint that has been applied in such a way that it obscures layers of original paint. (Adapted from National Gallery of Art online glossary) as a Christ child with a crown of thorns. Removal of the overpaint, prior to its acquisition by G.H.A. Clowes, revealed a sleeping Cupid; see Technical Examination Report. ↩︎ -
See agreements between Clowes and Podgoursky, 1951–1952, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎
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Clowes bought the painting in installments beginning in November 1951; see agreements between Clowes and Podgoursky, 1951–1952, File C10016, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎