Putto the events depicted in narrative paintings. There are two popular forms of the putto as the main subject of a work of art in 16th-century Italian Renaissance art: the sleeping putto and the standing putto with an animal or other object. Putti, cupids, and angels (see below) can be found in both religious and secular art from the 1420s in Italy, the turn of the 16th century in the Netherlands and Germany, the Mannerist period and late Renaissance in France, and throughout Baroque ceiling frescoes. So many artists have depicted them that a list would be pointless, but among the
Children Playing with a Goat they slowly became known as "witjes" (little whites). The shadows in the painting are supposed to be aligned with the light source, so in this case, the painting was probably an overdoor with a window on the left. The painter Jacob de Wit excelled at this "painting of putti in a bas-relief" style of grisaille, and though no original autograph version of this specific scene is known, the art historian Hessel Miedema discovered two "grauwtjes" by De Wit after reliefs by Duquesnoy in the estate sale of Lambert ten Kate. According to Walter Liedtke, a comparison of this painting with