Sculpted in the round.

Several minor points of damage on the surface.

…; with the entire collection of Frederik Count De Thoms (1696-1746), Leiden, fl. 30,000, to Prince William IV of Orange-Nassau (1711-1751), Kabinet van Antiquiteiten, Stadhouderlijk Kabinet, The Hague, 1751;¹¹J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 243 and S.W.A. Drossaers and T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer (eds.), Inventarissen van de inboedels in de verblijven van de Oranjes en daarmee gelijk te stellen stukken 1567-1795, 3. vols, The Hague 1974-76, vol. 2 (1975), p. 745, no. 57: 1 moderne group spelende kinderen van den ridder Bernini. For De Thoms, see R.B. Halbertsma, Scholars, Travellers and Trade: The Pioneer Years of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden 1818-1840, London/New York 2003, pp. 11-14. transferred to the Nationale Konst-Gallery in Huis ten Bosch, The Hague, 1800;²²Mentioned in the 1801 inventory by C.S. Roos, see E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum: Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1909, p. 52, no. 216: Twee worstelende kinderen. transferred to the Koninklijk Museum in the Royal Palace, Amsterdam, 1808; transferred to the Rijksmuseum in the Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, 1817; transferred to the museum, 1885/87

Object number: BK-B-8

Over the years, this Amsterdam sculpture has been attributed to various sculptors. In the inventories of the stadholder collection and the Nationale Konst-Gallery, the group was initially recorded as a work by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and later as by Jan Baptist Xavery (1697-1742).³³S.W.A. Drossaers and T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer (eds.), Inventarissen van de inboedels in de verblijven van de Oranjes en daarmee gelijk te stellen stukken 1567-1795, 3. vols, The Hague 1974-76, vol. 2 (1975), p. 745, no. 57 and E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum: Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1909, pp. 109, 125. Leeuwenberg rightly linked the sculptor to the artistic sphere of François du Quesnoy (1597-1643).⁴⁴J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 243. This Flemish sculptor was active in Rome, where, in the 1620s, he popularized the plumpish putto type from which the two romping lads of the present group are clearly derived.⁵⁵M. Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597-1643, Paris 2005, pp. 74-83. The rocky base on which they stand is also very similar to that of Du Quesnoy’s renowned statue of Cupid Carving his Bow in the Bode Museum in Berlin (c. 1626).⁶⁶Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung, inv. no. 540. The visual motif of wrestling putti – dating back to models from antiquity but again revived in the painted repertoires of Guido Reni and others⁷⁷For an example from antiquity, see H. Tietze, Die Denkmale der Stadt Wien (XI.-XII Bezirk), Vienna 1908, figs. 539-40. Cf. the Fight of the Amoretti and the Baccarini (1628) painted by Guido Reni in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome, inv. no. FC 257. – also appears in other earlier works by the same sculptor, i.e. in relief form as part of a larger theme, for example, in combination with an obstinate billy goat (BK-2014-28), and possibly also as an independent subject rendered in three dimensions.⁸⁸Cf. M. Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597-1643, Paris 2005, nos. 65, 68. For instance, a (plaster cast of a) figure attributed to Du Quesnoy is depicted in a drawing by Jan de Bisschop (RP-T-1913-90). For the present composition, Alessandro Algardi’s famous Eros and Anteros group from 1630 likely formed a direct source of inspiration (fig. a).⁹⁹For this sculpture, see J. Montagu, Alessandro Algardi, New Haven 1985, no. L.112; M. Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597-1643, Paris 2005, fig. 76; F. Scholten and G. Swoboda (eds.), Caravaggio-Bernini: The Early Baroque in Rome, exh. cat. Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2019-20, no. 13. The poses of the fighting youths, with Eros pushing his opponent Anteros backwards to the ground, are highly similar. In the Amsterdam version, however, the attributes (blindfold, bow and quiver of arrows) and wings of Algardi’s mythological children are omitted, thus allowing a broader interpretation.

The present group was in the possession of the renowned collector of antiquities, Frederik Count De Thoms (1696-1746).¹⁰¹⁰For De Thoms, see R.B. Halbertsma, Scholars, Travellers and Trade: The Pioneer Years of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden 1818-1840, London/New York 2003, pp. 11-14. As a diplomat with an international career, De Thoms travelled frequently throughout Europe. During the 1730s, prior to settling in Leiden, he spent a great deal of his time in Italy, where he established the core of his collection. In all probability, De Thoms acquired the present marble group in Italy. An identical group (60 x 47 cm), today preserved at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome (fig. b), was long mistaken as a Roman work from the second century.¹¹¹¹Rome, Palazzo Corsini, inv. no. 613. This group was previously preserved at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, see A. Rossi, La Villa d’Este a Tivoli: Il Fiore dei musei e monumenti d’Italia 1935, p. XXI als ‘Roman, 2nd century AD’; see also T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Het Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden en zijn beteekenis voor het Rijksmuseum’, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek 13 (1946), pp. 50-67, p. 52, who erroneously assumed that the Tivoli group had served as a model for the Rijksmuseum group. In 2008, a variant of the same composition – differing solely in minor details – was sold in the United Kingdom.¹²¹²Sale Billingshurst (Summers Place Auctions Ltd.), 20 May 2008, no. 12, as ‘a carved white marble group of squabbling putti after Caracci, Anglo Dutch, early 18th century’. All three marble groups were carved in the same, almost mechanical way, most likely in the same workshop and in a certain number of editions. This may quite conceivably have occurred in Rome in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, produced at the request of interested collectors like De Thoms or as a souvenir for travellers making their ‘grand tour’ of Italy.¹³¹³A comparable marble group comprising three wrestling putti is preserved in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 243, with earlier literature; Van Thiel 1981, no. 206; B. Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij and A. Hartkamp, ‘Oranje’s erfgoed in het Mauritshuis: De lotgevallen van de collecties van het Huis van Oranje in de periode 1795-1816, en het mecenaat van Koning Willem I’, Oud Holland 102 (1988), pp. 181-235, esp. p. 231, under fig. 4

B. van der Mark, 2024, 'anonymous, Two Putti Romping, Italy, c. 1670 - c. 1730', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035655