Contemporary art-lovers recognized Tintoretto's recumbent Amor as a reference to what was then a famous statue of the Sleeping Cupid at the ducal court of Mantua: in the 'grotta' of Isabella d'Este, distinguished connoisseurs of art were set a puzzle by being shown, successively, the young Michelangelo's Sleeping Cupid a homage to antiquity, or alternatively a fake and a very similar sculpture said to be by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles (c. 350 BC). The visitors were then asked to say which was the old statue and which the new.
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