Copy after a Sculpture of the Sleeping Eros Based on an Antique Model (from Cassiano dal Pozzo's 'Paper Museum')

The traditional attribution to Canini is not implausible, for the artist made a specialty of drawn copies of classical antiquities and his manner of articulating some anatomical details such as the hands of the child are not dissimilar to his prepartory drawings for paintings. An ambitious project for a corpus of classical antiquities commissioned by Colbert for Louis XIV was cut short by Canini's death, though a good many drawings by Canini after medals and cameos were engraved by Etienne Picart (Images des héros et des grands hommes de l'antiquité dessinées sur des médailles, des pierres antiques et autres anciens monuments par Jean-Ange Canini, gravées par Picart Le Romain, Amsterdam, 1731).
In contrast, Eloisa Dodero (Warburg Institute - Cassiano dal Pozzo Project, London; communication on April 14, 2014) has identified the Metropolitan Museum's drawing as by Pietro Testa, and has compared it to the copy after the antique (Royal Library 8799, Windsor), for example. Testa's draftsmanship, however, is much more powerful than the Metropolitan Museum drawing or the Windsor drawing evidence. Moreover, upon a closer comparison, the copy after the antique (Royal Library 8799, Windsor) does not seem to provide a fully convincing basis for also attributing the Metropolitan Museum drawing to that same hand: it is of a more static, dry draftsmanship, has very crude vertical parallel hatching at left on the pedestal, and there are no tonal nuances with light hatching as in the Windsor drawing to define the anatomy of the Cupid. What is indisputable is that this drawing is part of the enterprise of copies after the antique done for Cassiano dal Pozzo. Dodero rightly adds the following important information about this provenance: The Metropolitan Museum drawing has the typical "Type A" of Cassiano dal Pozzo's mounts, documenting with certainty it came from his collection. All the "Type A" mounts date to before 1640. A watermark is present on the right side of the drawing's Cassiano dal Pozzo, representing a Keeling Man in a Shield (33 x 67 mm, close to Woodward no. 26, n.d.). Another drawing copying an Etruscan bronze finial representing two warriors also emanates from Cassiano dal Pozzo's Museo Cartaceo and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998.327).

(Carmen C. Bambach; July 5, 2014)