Putto with Garland

The first documented reference to the Putto dates from 1829. It was bequeathed to the Academy in 1834 by the French painter and art collector Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762-1834), who had held positions of great importance within the Academy. The Academy’s Putto shares similarities with the putto to the left of the prophet Isaiah, painted by Raphael in 1511-1512 in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino. It was long considered a nineteenth-century fake, but following recent stylistic analysis and a detailed reassessment of the results of the diagnostic analysis carried out in 1962, it is now generally held to be an original.
[S. Ventra]