Portrait of a Boy Holding a Child's Drawing

More than four centuries after this panel was painted, a British paediatrician on holiday in Italy, Harry Angelman, stood in front of it here at Castelvecchio. At the time it was known as Boy with a Puppet, because the scribble on the sheet the boy holds up was read as a puppet. Angelman had been treating three unrelated children with a similar set of symptoms, among them jerky movements and frequent laughter, and he later wrote that the painting gave him the idea of describing them together. His paper of 1965 called them puppet children. The condition now carries his name, Angelman syndrome, and the old label was dropped in the 1980s as hurtful to families.

The museum values the picture as an important historical document for the drawing alone. The red-haired boy, painted around 1520, holds out a sheet with a little stick figure on it, the kind of drawing children still make.