Cupids Disarming Sleeping Nymphs

In Cupids Disarming Sleeping Nymphs the Bolognese painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi turns the frolicking putto of Baroque decoration into a scene of velvet mischief: a band of cupids creeps over a drowsing nymph to unpin her drapery and steal her arrows while she sleeps. Crespi, one of the most independent talents of late seventeenth-century Bologna, was admired by his contemporaries and by later painters such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo for the dark, glinting warmth of his paint and the tenderness of his observation. Painted on copper around 1690 to 1705, the panel glows with rosy flesh, crimson stuffs and dusky shadow, giving a light, almost operatic theme an intimacy unusual for its time. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.