CIRCA 2ND-3RD CENTURY A.D.

Cupid is here depicted as a chubby adolescent boy, standing with his head dramatically turned over his right shoulder, with his right arm extending across his torso. His characteristic long wavy hair is arranged in a loose central top-knot with long tresses terminating in corkscrew curls. He has pudgy cheeks, heavy-lidded eyes and parted lips pursed ever so slightly into an impish smile. In the absence of surviving attributes such as wings, bow or torch, it is impossible to say if the divine child is the intended subject rather than a mortal boy, but Cupid seems likely. In fact the god can be shown wingless, as seen on a pair of Roman silver skyphoi where winged and wingless Cupids cavort together (see no. 387 in Picón, Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). For the attribute once held by the Cupid presented here, compare the wall-painting from Pompeii, now in the National Archeological Museum, Naples, where a Cupid holds a torch to one side in both hands while similarly turning his head away (see no. 151 in Blanc and Gury, “Eros/Amor, Cupido,” LIMC, vol. III).

This statue was previously in the collection of Larz Anderson (1866-1937) and Isabel Weld Perkins (1876-1948). Anderson, an American ambassador posted to Italy, met Perkins in 1896 when she was in Europe for her Grand Tour. Born in Boston and the only child of Civil War naval officer George Hamilton Perkins, she came from one of America’s most prominent families and was a multi-millionaire by the time she was five. The Andersons soon built a Beaux-Arts style mansion on Embassy Row in Washington that was used to showcase their eclectic collection of historic artifacts acquired during their travels abroad. The Anderson House, as it was known, in addition to the collection, was bequeathed to the Society of the Cincinnati upon Larz’s death. The cupid presented here is mounted on an inverted ancient marble column capital, and was once displayed in the Anderson mansion with other Roman marbles of comparable scale similarly mounted.