Crying Boy Stung by a Bee

Entry

When sold as part of J.W. Jitta’s large art collection in Amsterdam in 1897, this expressive boxwood relief of a crying boy was thought to have been carved by Michelangelo. A label on the reverse, dating from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, not only records this rather absurd attribution to one of the greatest sculptors in art history, but also conveys the high regard with which its quality was apparently perceived. The sculpture sold for 320 guilders, a large sum for its day but one nevertheless scarcely reflecting its purported authorship. In a letter of 13 October 1926 addressed to the daughter of the Amsterdam art collector Otto Lanz, the relief’s then owner, J.A. Josephus Jitta, wrote that the renowned Dutch art expert ‘professor Vogelzang [sic]’ had attributed the head ‘to the sixteenth-century Bavarian sculptor “Kilian”.’¹¹ This description is almost surely mistaken, given that no sculptor is known to have come from this Augsburg artist’s family of engravers, goldsmiths and painters. In 1973, Avery came with a more convincing attribution for the child’s head, instead establishing ties to the seventeenth-century Amsterdam sculptor Hendrick de Keyser (1565-1621). Indeed, striking parallels exist to the bronze weeping putti adorning De Keyser’s opus magnum – William of Orange’s monumental tomb in Delft (fig. a) – and the mascarons of mourning children on the façade of the Delft town hall.¹² An even greater agreement can be observed when comparing the boxwood carving to a small bronze bust of a crying child, which Avery also linked to De Keyser (fig. b).¹³ The two heads are identical along general lines, though keeping in mind the bronze was conceived in the round, while the boxwood face was executed in high relief and mounted on a tondo.¹⁴ The agreement is so precise that the casting model for the bronze could only have been taken directly from the wooden carving and thereafter modified in the wax.

Despite the stylistic affinity between the present child’s head and the above-cited bronzes, several evident differences must also be noted. Largely attributable to the technical limitations of the bronze medium are the higher level of detail and greater three-dimensionality of the boxwood head. The wooden child has individual, extending pointed locks of hair. When executed in bronze, by contrast, the curls of the hair virtually cling to the head. Similarly, the furrows of the skin on the relief-carved piece appear to be modelled with greater liveliness and covering the skull more fluidly, with the ears sticking out from the head further. The most noticeable difference between the Amsterdam relief and the bronze heads, however, is the presence of an anecdotal detail that provides the most logical reason for the child’s extreme display of emotion: a honeybee just above the right temple that stings the little boy. Avery maintained that the present work is a copy carved in wood, modelled after one of De Keyser’s bronzes.¹⁵ Nevertheless, the logic behind the iconographic motif of the stinging bee, further supported by the greater level of detail and three-dimensionality, indicate just the opposite: namely, that the wood-carved child’s head is in fact the most original version, with the bronze being a more decorative, simplified variant thereof.

That the present Crying Boy was unlikely carved after De Keyser’s own lifetime is confirmed by its stylistic similarity to the auricular ornamentation (kwabstijl) first appearing on Northern Netherlandish silver circa 1610. De Keyser must have been fascinated with the new style and drew his inspiration from such works, especially those by the Utrecht goldsmith Adam van Vianen (1568-1627) – with which he was undoubtedly familiar – or the fantastical, grotesque engraving designs of Arent van Bolten.¹⁶ The whimsical forms of the child’s extended ears and the flowing lines of the face – visible even below the tongue – seem almost direct quotations of the organic forms that characterize Van Vianen’s kwab silver.¹⁷ As a result, the crying boy’s countenance becomes virtually caricatural in appearance, reminiscent of grotesque mascarons. De Keyser applied such fantasized masks – often depicted with gaping mouths – in a variety of ways, as decorative elements in his architecture and even as design elements terminating his busts.¹⁸ By no means insignificant in this context – as previously noted by Avery – is the boy’s similarity to an auricular-style Christ Child in Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Adoration of the Magi from 1619 (SK-A-4188). Accordingly, the determination of this boxwood Crying Boy as a work from the first quarter of the seventeenth century made in the Northern Netherlands becomes arguable on stylistic grounds, with an attribution to Hendrick de Keyser most apparent. This is further supported by De Keyser’s portrait bust of William of Orange, which, like the Crying Boy, exists both in the form of a sculpture in the round and a half-version executed in high relief.¹⁹ The choice of boxwood as a sculpture medium is likewise exemplified by a statuette of St John the Evangelist attributable to De Keyser, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.²⁰

The stinging honeybee on the boxwood relief possibly provides a key to understanding the sculpture’s iconographic meaning. Carved from a separate piece of wood and inserted into the child’s head, it could also have been added later.²¹ If originally conceived as such, however, its presence may be tied to an idyll traditionally ascribed to the Greek poet Theocritus (third century BC) that relates the anecdote of Cupid the honey-thief: ‘When the thievish Love one day was stealing honeycomb from the hive, a wicked bee stung him, and made all his finger-tips to smart. In pain and grief, he blew on his hand and stamped and leapt upon the ground, and went and showed his hurt to Aphrodite, and made complaint that so a little a beast as a bee could make so great a wound. Whereat his mother laughing, ‘What?’ cries she, ‘art not a match for a bee, and thou so little and yet able to make wounds so great?’²² In the early sixteenth century, this verse was available in various translations, among them an English translation by Thomas More. The poem was chiefly seen as an admonition against love’s ‘sweet’ temptation. Dürer made a drawing (Vienna, Albertina) based on the theme in 1514, followed by Lucas Cranach, who rendered the episode in various painted versions around 1526.²³ In strict terms, the Idylls only make mention of Cupid being stung by a bee in the finger. By as early as Cranach, however, images also show the bee stinging him in the head.

Prior to the seventeenth century, Theocritus’s idyll involving Cupid had no clear visual tradition in the Northern or Southern Netherlands. In De Keyser’s day, however, the story was fairly well known. This is largely attributable to Daniel Heinsius’ Emblemata Amatoria, a collection of poems dedicated to the god of love published in Amsterdam in 1616. One of the verses bears the title Cupido honich-dief, uyt Theocritus (Cupid Honey-Thief, from Theocritus’).²⁴ The episode also appears in an anonymous collection of poems entitled Thronus Cupidinis, of which the third edition was published in Amsterdam in 1620.²⁵

The Crying Boy is a relatively early example of the growing interest in showing the emotions of the human face in sculpture, which only comes to full fruition in the seventeenth century – partly influenced by sculptural studies of the Laocoön – and culminates in F.X. Messerschmidt’s series of caricatural heads.²⁶ Notheworthy is that several Italian, Early-Baroque scenes in this same genre, more or less contemporaneous with De Keyser’s Boy, also show children or youths being bitten by an animal. Examples include Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard (c. 1597-98) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Putto Bitten by a Dolphin (c. 1618).²⁷ It appears that De Keyser had begun to explore the theme of the crying child when commencing work on William of Orange’s tomb monument in Delft (starting in 1613). The bronze weeping putti and heads of cherubs incorporated in his design are sculptural details clearly related to the Crying Boy relief, most evident in the torch-and-shield bearing putti at the top of the tomb and the winged mascarons surmounting the cartouche with epitaph.²⁸ A similar depiction of mourning, though far less expressive, can also be observed on an alabaster head of a child attributed to the De Keyser-workshop.²⁹ More akin, however, is a crying angel’s head clearly derived from the monument in Delft on the Van Brouchoven wall monument in the Sint-Pieterskerk in Leiden (design by Arent van ’s Gravenzande, c. 1645). Additionally, two mourning angels from a Christ as Man of Sorrows by Gerhard Gröninger (1582-1652) in the Marienkirche in Ahlen (Westphalia) were clearly inspired by De Keyser’s bronze putti on the Delft tomb.³⁰

Moreover, there is a strong possibility that the Amsterdam boxwood sculpture was produced somewhat earlier than the funeral monument of William of Orange, as is suggested by the mention of ‘Une teste d’un enffant criard, taillée en bois, d’Albert Durez [Albrecht Dürer], ayant une mouche le piquant au front, d’haulteur de neufz po[u]lces, nº 111.31’ in the 1607 estate inventory of Cardinal Granvelle. The head described here, given the close agreement, is quite conceivably the Amsterdam work, though one cannot rule out that De Keyser might have produced more than one. In any event, its mention in Granvelle’s inventory demonstrates that the sculpture (or one highly similar to it) existed before 1607. The erroneous attribution to Dürer reflects a broader tendency (‘Dürer revival’) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century to attach the German painter’s name to all sorts of cabinet sculpture, often also furnished with fake 'AD'-monograms.

In the Northern and Southern Netherlands, sculpted heads of crying children became fairly common no earlier than the end of the seventeenth century, for example, in the oeuvre of the sculptor Johan Claudius de Cock (1667-1735).³¹ In some cases, such mournful little boys possibly formed pendants of laughing children, thus representing youthful, humorous parodies of the classical philosopher’s duo, Heraclitus and Democritus.³²

Among examples of eighteenth-century German cabinet sculpture, several ivories can be linked to the Amsterdam Crying Boy. Case in point are three weeping child’s heads in Braunschweig, one of which has been attributed to Johann Christoph Ludwig Lücke (c. 1703-c. 1780).³³This sculptor’s oeuvre also includes two less sentimental but more dynamically carved crying infants: a miniature bust in London and a small, ivory-carved medallion relief in Schwerin.³⁴ De Keyser’s influence on Lücke and others can be explained by plaster casts of the present boxwood Cupid or its bronze derivate circulating in the eighteenth century. A painting of the atelier of the Antwerp sculptor Guillaume (Willem) de Groff (c. 1680-1742) by Jan Josef Horemans (1682-1759) confirms that such casts indeed existed: a plaster ‘mask’ of the Crying Boy rests on the shelf visible far right.³⁵ An inscribed annotation on Lücke’s ivory relief in Schwerin somewhat reflects an eighteenth-century sculptor’s appreciation for carvings displaying such a high level of expressive naturalism: ‘A crying child’s head. The expression is so strong that, in the mouth, one can see the uvula of the palate […]’.³⁶ The same words can just as readily be applied to the Crying Boy – a masterpiece of Northern Netherlandish cabinet sculpture from the early seventeenth century, characterized by a perfect balance of natural observation, physiognomic expression and stylization.

Frits Scholten, 2025