The Lost Sleeping Cupid of Michelangelo

Abstract

MICHELANGELO began work on his famous Sleeping Cupid in 1495, just after returning to Florence from Bologna. The account of the creation and early history of the work is most credibly related by Condivi.¹ He tells the well-known story of how Cardinal Raffaello Riario in Rome bought the Cupid believing it an antique piece. The Cardinal later discovered his error, returned the statue to the wily dealer Baldassare del Milanese and received his money back. Vasari aptly remarks that “the Cardinal … did not escape blame for not recognizing the merit of the work, for when the moderns equal the ancients in perfection it is a mere empty preference of a name to the reality when men prefer the works of the latter to those of the former, though such men are found in every age.”² When Michelangelo discovered that Baldassare had made an excessively large profit in selling his work to the Cardinal, he went to Rome and heatedly demanded his Cupid. But the dealer curtly replied that “he would rather break it into a hundred pieces; he had bought the child, and it was his property.”³