Bacchanal of Putti with Two Herms

In 1624 two young foreigners were sharing a house in Rome, the French painter Nicolas Poussin and the Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy. Their early biographer, Giovan Pietro Bellori, wrote that Duquesnoy fell in love with the tender infants in Titian's paintings, and that he and Poussin modelled them together in clay. This canvas of 1626 is the painter's side of that shared study, the larger of a pair of children's bacchanals. Under a cloth slung between two bearded herms, one child rides a goat while the others tumble round a golden jug. Duquesnoy, for his part, turned the same game into marble, a relief of small boys wrestling a goat, one of them wearing a mask, which is now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome.