Winged putto

This fragment, belonging to a much larger cycle of frescoes, comes from the loggia on the first floor of Villa Soranzo at Treville (near Castelfranco Veneto), designed by Michele Sanmicheli and frescoed in 1551 by Veronese and by Giambattista Zelotti. The building was destroyed between 1817 and 1819. On that occasion the frescoes were detached, with a still experimental technique, by Count Filippo Balbi of Venice, a chemist and engineer, who put them up for sale. From then on the various fragments were scattered, following different routes, and it was only some years later, in 1890, that the putto now in Vicenza arrived in the painting collection in Palazzo Chiericati, as a gift from the engineer Giovan Battista Cita.

With this work the young Veronese offers a sample of his skill and ability in rendering the foreshortened view. The little putto with monumental proportions, looking through the balustrade, is compressed into a narrow space, “limited and circumscribed by a scenic, illusionistic architecture” (Villa).

There is a strong reference to Central Italian figurative culture, particularly to the Mannerism favoured in the area around Mantua and Emilia, but Veronese reinterprets it and makes innovations, adding to the precise and sure drawing with which he outlines the putto’s figure, especially the facial features, the modelling of the voluminous masses created by the intense light which brightens and softens the colours.