Titian or workshop of Titian, 'A Boy with a Bird', 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 work by Titian and his studio 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 of the picture. An X-radiograph not only shows that the boy once had wings, which have been painted over, but also, more surprisingly, that there is a totally different composition beneath the paint layers. This earlier picture relates to the woodcut Landscape with a Milkmaid, designed by Titian and generally attributed to Niccolò Boldrini, executed around 1523. The landscape painting beneath the infant is of closely similar format and includes the same elements but its figures are of different scale to the ones in the woodcut composition. It may have been an attempt to convert the woodcut into a painting, or perhaps a painted trial for the woodcut. Technical evidence suggests that the lower painting was fully dry before Boy with a Bird was painted on top of it. However, there is no trace of varnish or dirt on the surface of the painting underneath to indicate that it was considered finished or that much time elapsed between both paintings being made.

The design of Boy with a Bird seems to relate to a lost Venus and Adonis of the 1520s by Titian, once owned by the Earl of Arundel and copied as a miniature by Peter Oliver (now in Burghley House, Stamford). After it left the Earl of Arundel’s collection, the Venus and Adonis entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. It was destroyed in 1945 but is recorded in a photograph, which does not show Cupid. A description of the painting prior to its destruction explains that ‘in this picture, Cupid with the dove is now missing because a piece of the canvas has been cut away and substituted by a new piece of canvas, which has been painted’.

However, the presence of the earlier landscape composition beneath the paint layers confirms that Boy with a Bird is not a fragment from a larger composition but was always intended as a self-sufficient picture of that size. The alterations made to it during painting are not the adjustments of a copyist but more typical of the way an artist would have tried to resolve uncertainties when creating a new design. The development of the picture also seems too complicated for a later pastiche.

Boy with a Bird is a slight, hastily painted work on a reused canvas, either by the master or more likely by a member of his workshop, giving independent life to a motif extracted from the innovative Venus and Adonis. It is confidently and rapidly executed, and the evidence of change to the wings during painting may mean that the picture is by Titian himself, perhaps intended as a gift.