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A grotesque accouchement. Oil painting.
- Pietro, della Vecchia, 1602 or 1603-1678.
- Date
- [between 1600 and 1699]
- Pictures
- Online
Available online
Licence
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
You can use this work for any purpose, as long as it is not primarily intended for or directed to commercial advantage or monetary compensation. You should also provide attribution to the original work, source and licence.
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) terms and conditions https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Credit: A grotesque accouchement. Oil painting. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Selected images from this work
About this work
Description
Four grotesque dwarfish figures: a hunchbacked man and an old midwife help a woman give birth, producing eggs, while on the left a woman boils a donkey in a cauldron to produce gruel for the mother. In the foreground, babies break out of the eggs: possibly a parody of Leonardo da Vinci's painting of Leda and the swan
Publication/Creation
[between 1600 and 1699]
Physical description
1 painting : oil on canvas ; canvas 64 x 76 cm
Reference
Wellcome Library no. 44686i
Creator/production credits
Pictures of crowds of tiny dwarfs are often attributed to Faustino Bocchi or to the anonymous Maestro della Fertilità dell'Uovo. The present picture, however, is in a very different style, showing the dwarfs much larger by comparison with the size of the painting than is usual in paintings firmly attributed to Bocchi. An alternative attribution to Pietro Della Vecchia has been suggested