Boy bitten by a mouse, Italian school of the 17th century

Oil painting on canvas depicting a boy bitten by a mouse.

Literature

F. Scaletti, Caravaggio, Catalog raisonné of dedicated, attributed and controversial works, Naples 2017, vol. II, p. 65, reproduced in black and white fig. 66 (as a Caravaggesque artist; incorrectly identified as the Mameli version).

This work, probably executed around 1620, is inspired by Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard kept at the National Gallery in London.
The popularity of Caravaggio's early Roman paintings led to a proliferation of copies and adaptations. Among the various interpretations of this type of subject is The Boy Bitten by a Crayfish at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg, a work variously attributed to various 17th-century painters and today associated with the retired Saracens.

The young boy, eyes wide with shock and mouth wide open, screams in agony as a mouse bites his index finger. The work could be read as an allegory of pain: the boy who tortured the mouse is then bitten, thus having to endure the same type of pain that he has just inflicted on him.

Besides the current painting, two other versions of this composition are known: one in the Borromeo collection, Isola Bella, and another formerly in the Mameli collection, Rome, and sold (as a Roman school, early 17th century) at auction (Vienna , Dorotheum, November 10, 2020, lot 86).