A putto is a small, chubby, naked boy who appears in paintings and sculpture, very often with a pair of wings. Putti hold up garlands, carry coats of arms, play music and float around gods and saints. The best-known pair lean on a ledge at the bottom of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, chins in their hands, looking up.
The word is Italian for "boy," from the Latin putus, and English has kept its Italian plural, putti. The figure is much older than the word. It began in ancient Greece as the god of love in the shape of a child, vanished for most of the Middle Ages and came back in Florence in the fifteenth century.
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Most people would call Raphael's two boys cherubs. In the Bible, a cherub looks nothing like a baby. The prophet Ezekiel describes each one with four faces and four wings, and in the ranking of angels written down in the late fifth century, cherubim sit just below the seraphs, among the highest powers of heaven.
The chubby boy has a different ancestor. He belonged to Eros, the Greek god of desire, and to his Roman counterpart Cupid. He ran along the walls of Roman dining rooms and the marble sides of children's coffins long before any Christian painter gave one a halo.
So the pair under Raphael's Madonna are not angels in the sense the Bible gives the word. They descend from a pagan god of love, and he reached the feet of the Virgin in two steps. Ancient artists turned him into a child, and fifteenth-century Florence turned that child into a Christian figure.
What You'll Discover
The Greek god who became a baby.
The sculptor who brought putti back.
Where cherubs and putti part ways.
How to tell a putto from Cupid.
What putti do on a ceiling.
Where Raphael's famous pair came from.