At the boundaries of sight

Perhaps cloud putti were meant to be overlooked. Composed of the very clouds that support and surround sacred personages in Italian Renaissance paintings, the cloud putto may serve its purpose best when it goes practically unseen (Figure 12). Compared to its clothed and embodied angelic cousins, the cloud putto is a nascent being, an angel before its assumption of full fleshly form. Invisible to all but attentive viewers, cloud putti are the most elusive figures in the religious images of the time, so much so, that even the word “figure” here may be misleading. Many cloud putti appear in states before the last stages of their reification, as emergent faces, heads, or upper torsos, mere extensions of larger cloud masses that fall well short of the normative bodies discussed in Renaissance theories of history painting. They have also been largely neglected by scholars, for while recent scholarship has explored aspects of the rich conceptual history of spirits assuming aerial bodies, especially as regards the demonic, many aspects of the history and significance of cloud spirits, especially in relation to the tradition of representing angels, remain to be considered. ¹ In tracing aspects of the history of the cloud putto, this article seeks to redress this omission. It asks important questions about the cloud putto’s theological meaning, and marks its significance within the context of the period’s artistic practices. In doing so, it shows that cloud putti, far from being supporting characters or unimportant beings, help, as inhabitants of the boundaries of the visible world, to establish the representational status of numerous important images. As we shall see, the cloud putto can tell us much about how the artist might accommodate the supernatural within the norms of naturalistic painting.