Two Children Teasing a Cat

Two Children Teasing a Cat is an oil painting on canvas created c. 1587–1588 by the Italian painter Annibale Carracci, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which acquired it in 1994. Previously attributed to Agostino Carracci, Roberto Longhi gave it its present attribution, now largely accepted. No documents survive on its commissioning and so its dating is purely on stylistic grounds. This places it in the artist's relative youth, when he was still producing several genre works.

The influence of Tintoretto and other Venetian artists is evident, placing it at the end of the 1580s, at which time the artist is known to have been staying in Venice.

The physical object — Oil on canvas, 26 x 35 in. (66 x 88.9 cm) — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Annibale Carracci's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of Baroque studio practice.

Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Scenes like this were prized precisely because they made ordinary labor and leisure worth painting at all.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York now holds the work, where conservators and historians continue to revisit its condition and attribution. Each generation of scholarship adds a layer to how Annibale Carracci's output from this period is understood.

“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”