Amor - Cupid fashioning his bow

This is an early replica after Parmigianino's Amor, one of the artist's most widely celebrated and reproduced pictures (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. no. 275). Painted in circa 1530, Amor achieved early notoriety and was to inspire countless copies, the majority of which date from after 1603 when the picture was acquired by Rudolf II for his galleries in Prague. Copies from around this time include those painted by Joseph Heintz the Elder soon after its arrival there in circa 1605 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. no. 1523), and by Rubens who made a loose copy in 1614 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. no. 1304).

The present picture can be distinguished from these and all subsequent replicas by the inclusion of a fastening strap on the left side of the upper book. This is of particular significance as the strap in the original was only revealed in cleaning in 2000, having previously been masked by a much earlier painted repair applied sometime before 1600. Only two other early known copies show the strap, the painting in the Contini Bonacossi collection, Florence and that in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, both of which have early provenances that suggest they were painted for Italian collections. On this basis, the present work is thought to have been painted in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century.