Busy babies at the Library of Congress
Baby hunter (by Carol M. Highsmith)
It’s summer, I’m on vacation (though still will be posting some new pieces during the week), and Washington is filled with tourists, so here’s a little offbeat piece for the city’s visitors.
Washington D.C. is not exactly known as a laugh-riot city, and certainly not through its very serious marble sculpture. But it turns out the Library of Congress — of all places — offers something of a respite from that reputation.
On a recent trip to the library, I was amused by the sculpted baby boys — known asputti in Italian Renaissance art, plural for putto — on the grand staircase banisters of the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building. Each one is in marble to represent a different adult occupation or interest in the late 1800s, when the building was designed. There’s a baby gardener and a baby entomologist and a baby hunter and a baby scholar and a baby mechanic and a baby electrician and a baby astronomer and, well, you get
