A grotesque accouchement. Oil painting.

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

[between 1600 and 1699]

1 painting : oil on canvas ; canvas 64 x 76 cm

Wellcome Library no. 44686i

Pictures of crowds of tiny dwarfs are often attributed to Faustino Bocchi. 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