Italian, early 17th century | After the Antique | Putto holding a torch and a basket

This intriguing putto appears to be a copy of an ancient Roman marble currently in a private collection, which was reworked around 1600. Originally conceived as a trapezophoros (table leg) and probably representing a season, the circa 2nd-century AD marble was restored with a new head and torch, and inscribed with an identification as Hesperus. In the 1630s it was recorded in the collection of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), who - compellingly - is likely to have acquired the marble from Peter Paul Rubens. The marble in its pre-restoration state can be identified in a drawing accompanying a 1577 letter by the Venetian art dealer Andrea Londano to Francesco I de’Medici, depicted next to an Attic grave stele known later to have been in Rubens’s collection. The ‘Hesperus’ was therefore probably among the ancient statuary shipped by Daniel Nys from Venice to London in 1615 and passed through the collection of Dudley Carleton, which was acquired by Rubens in 1618. 

A liberal adaptation of the restored antiquity, the present marble dispenses with the original’s table leg element in favour of a naturalistic tree stump support, as well as showing variations in the putto’s hairstyle, facial type and the basket design. It may well have been carved in Venice sometime between the ancient marble’s restoration around 1600 and its departure from Italy in 1615.