A Boy with a Bird
Artist: Titian (Italian, 1490 - 1576)
Original Dimensions: 13 3/4" x 19 1/4"
Location: National Gallery of Art, London
About Artwork: (Probably 1520s) "The infant cradling a dove to his cheek closely resembles Cupid in two versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, dating to around 1560, in Washington and New York. Yet the way in which the picture is painted and the range of colours used are characteristic of Titian’s work of the 1520s. This apparent contradiction led scholars in the past to believe that the painting was a seventeenth-century pastiche, but recent evidence has led to a re-evaluation. An X-radiograph not only shows that the boy once had wings, which have been painted over, but also that there is a totally different composition beneath the paint layers. This relates to the woodcut designed by Titian, Landscape with a Milkmaid, dated to around 1523. This makes it clear that A Boy with a Bird was made in Titian’s workshop, giving independent life to a motif extracted from the innovative Venus and Adonis." - (National Gallery of Art, London)

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