A putto (plural putti) is a chubby, naked baby boy, often winged, who appears in painting and sculpture. Putti play music, hold up garlands and float around gods and saints.
The best known pair sit at the bottom of the Sistine Madonna, an altarpiece of the Virgin and Child that Raphael painted about 1512, now in Dresden, Germany. They lean on a ledge, chins in their hands, and look up toward the Virgin.
The name is simply the Italian word for "boy," taken from the Latin putus, and English has kept the Italian plural. The figure itself is far older. It goes back to the pagan art of Greece and Rome, vanished for most of the Middle Ages and came back with a Florentine sculptor in the fifteenth century.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Because they have wings, Raphael's two boys are often taken for cherubs, a kind of angel. Yet a biblical cherub looks nothing like a baby. The prophet Ezekiel, who describes his visions of heaven in the Hebrew Bible, gives each one four faces and four wings.
A Christian writer of the late fifth century later ranked the angels from the highest down. In his order, cherubim come just below the seraphs, the angels closest to God, among the highest powers of heaven. Nothing about them is childlike.
The chubby boy has a pagan ancestor instead: Eros, the Greek god of desire, whom the Romans called Cupid.
The child god of Greece and Rome
At first, Greek artists showed Eros as a winged young man, not a baby…
What You'll Discover
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.
Why Raphael's famous pair ended up in Dresden.