¹ In European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance onward, the putto — the little angel — is a familiar ornamental motif: the round, cheerful child's body that populates clouds, adorns altars, and accompanies tomb monuments. The putto stands for innocence, for the heavenly, for the soul that has departed the earth. Decoration and symbol at once — and precisely for that reason, rendered almost invisible through familiarity.

2 The title Animulae refers to a poem attributed to the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE), preserved in the Historia Augusta as his dying words;

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corpori
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos.

Loosely: "Little wandering, coaxing soul, guest and companion of the body, to what places will you now go — pale, stiff, naked — no longer joking as you used to?"

The poem is known for its intimate, almost playful tone toward death — a farewell to the soul as something small, fragile, and faintly mischievous, rather than solemn or triumphant. 

This installation consists of are nine coloured putti¹ covered in papier-mâché, each based on a historical medical photograph of a sick, deformed, or deceased child. The forms have been translated into relief and painted in pronounced decorative colours. These Animulae² (2026) hang on the wall as putti populate a vault.

The use of colour is deliberate. Its cheerfulness stands in tension with the origin of the form — not to conceal, but to make visible a tension that was always already there. In the original tradition, the putto was never merely a cheerful child: it was also a little soul, a body that died too young and thereby earned heaven. The decorative form and the tragic content were intertwined from the outset.

These nine putti carry that history with them — as ornament, as commemoration, and as a reminder of what lies behind the motif.