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Bust of a Child
Unknown (Florence) · c. 1460 or c. 1500
A small child, cut off at the shoulders, looks straight ahead with the solemn, slightly puzzled expression that Florentine sculptors loved to give their putti. The bust is only forty centimetres high and carved in pietra serena, the soft grey sandstone of the Florentine hills that was normally used for doorframes and columns rather than portraits. Its matt, granular surface gives the round cheeks and the cap of curls a gentler look than marble would. Notice how thin the block is, barely five centimetres deep, which suggests it was set against a wall or over a door.
Busts of children became fashionable in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, when sculptors such as Desiderio da Settignano and Antonio Rossellino made portraits of little boys and of the Christ Child that patrons displayed in their homes. The museum records this piece as Florentine work of either around 1460 or around 1500, without a named author. It was bought in April 1859 from Count Horace de Viel-Castel, a senior official of the imperial museums and curator of medieval and Renaissance objects at the Louvre, one of the museum's early purchases of Italian Renaissance sculpture.
Did You Know? The bust is carved in the same grey stone that Florentine architects used for the columns and doorframes of their palaces.
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