This painting, Portrait of a Young Boy Holding a Drawing by Giovanni Francesco Caroto (1480 – 1555) is perhaps one of the strangest portraits from the Renaissance period. Since carota in Italian means carrot, and the boy in the painting has "carrot-top" colored hair, many believe it's a self portrait of the artist as a boy. Others think it's a portrait of the artist's son. There are some who believe that to truly represent a child's drawing in the portrait, Carota asked a child to paint that part of the picture, which if true, would mean that it has dual authorship--Carota and an unknown child.

This is also the painting from which Dr Harry Angelman derived the now defunct name of Happy Puppet Syndrome for children (now referred to as Angelman’s syndrome). In the painting, the boy’s happy expression and the jerky movement of the puppet of which he holds a picture, reminded Angelman of the behaviors exhibited by three young patients who had the syndrome in his pediatric ward in Warrington, England. Angleman’s syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized  by intellectual and developmental delay, sleep disturbance, seizures, jerky movements (especially hand-flapping), and frequent laughter or smiling. It affects approximately one in 20,000 children. 

To add more interest to this odd painting, it was among others stolen from the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona in 2014. Little more than a year later, the paintings were recovered in in the area of Odessa, on an island of the Dniester river not far from the partially recognized state of Transnistria, just a few kilometres away from the border between Ukraine and Moldavia. According to the Ukrainian police commissioner Viktor Nazarenko, the paintings were buried wrapped in some black plastic drop cloths and hidden behind some shrubs. (Watch the discovery in the video below).

--GVI