Putti Teasing a Goat, oil on canvas, 220 x 140 cm, framed

We are grateful to Professor Erich Schleier for suggesting the attribution. We are also grateful to Professor Silvia Danesi Squarzina for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a high-resolution digital photograph.

Carel Philips Spierinck, known as “Carlo Felippo fiammengo”, was a Flemish painter who settled in Rome immediately after 1622. The present composition derives from a scene depicted in the celebrated bas-relief Putti Teasing a Goat by François Duquesnoy. The painter has however here added putti, two on the left side and another one at the center in the foreground. Duquesnoy’s composition is itself related to Titian’s Bacchanalia, which at that time was in Rome in the Ludovisi Collection. We know from Bellori that Poussin also studied Titian’s Bacchanalia, reproducing the figures as terracotta models with the collaboration of Duquesnoy (see G.P. Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, Rome 1672, ed. Turin 1976, note 20, p. 289). The remarkable ability to translate Titian’s putti into sculpture seems to have influenced the typology of putti in Spierinck’s oeuvre, as can be seen in the present painting.

The exchange of ideas, models and influences concerning putti themes among Duquesnoy, Spierinck and Poussin is derived from the friendship that linked Duquesnoy and Spierinck, who lived together between 1630 and 1639 in via della Vittoria near Piazza di Spagna in Rome (see J. G. Hoogewerff, Nederlandsche Kunstenaars te Rome, L’Aja 1942, pp. 97, 99-101, 104, 108) and their relationship with Poussin, who had lived with Duquesnoy in via Paolina in Rome (see J. Bousquet, Chronologie du séjour romain de Poussin et de sa famille d’après les archives romain, in: Nicolas Poussin, edited by A. Chastel, Paris 1960, II, p. 4).

Duquesnoy’s influence is also visible in Spierinck’s painting Hagar Comforted by the Angel (Postdam, Neues Palais), recognized by Squarzina as the painting of circa 1635 formerly in the Giustiniani Collection (see S. Danesi Squarzina, A ‘Hagar and the Angel’ by Carel Philips Spierinck in Potsdam, in: The Burlington Magazine, 141.1999, p. 350, note 11, p. 351, note 21).

The putti in the present work can be compared to those in other paintings by Spierinck, such as The Drunken Silenus, probably executed in the early 1630s (see S. Danesi Squarzina, Carel Philips Spierinck. Dai Baccanali alla Storia Sacra, in: Roma luce ed ombra: due dipinti tra terzo e quarto decennio del Seicento ; “Santa Francesca Romana con l’Angelo”, Giovanni Antonio Galli detto Spadarino; “Sileno Ebbro”, Carel Philips Spierinck, Galleria Silvano Lodi & Due, edited by G. Porzio, Milan 2008), where the numerous naked putti depicted in different poses are inspired by Poussin. Danesi Squarzina has suggested that the ivy wrapped around the putti bodies or crowning their heads, such as that depicted the present painting, is a motif particular to Spierinck´s oeuvre and can be interpreted as a form of “signature” of the artist.