The Baroque cherub head, ubiquitous on Catholic altarpieces and tombs, is visually a classical putto — theologically it borrows the name of a far more austere angelic order.
In popular Christian art, a chubby winged child’s head or figure (technically closer to a putto) used decoratively in Renaissance and especially Baroque sculpture; theologically, the cherub is properly one of the highest orders of angels in the celestial hierarchy, a distinction the working sculptor should keep clear even while using the popular term.
Etymology
From Hebrew kerūb (plural kerūbīm), of uncertain further origin, possibly related to Akkadian karābu ("to bless" or "to pray"). The Hebrew term passed into Greek as cheroub in the Septuagint, thence into Latin cherub/cherubim, and into Italian cherubino, French chérubin, and English "cherub." The decorative sense familiar from Baroque sculpture is a much later grafting of the Hebrew theological term onto the visually unrelated classical putto/Eros figure.
Sculptor Notes
Two entirely distinct figures travel under the single English word "cherub," and a sculptor working in Catholic decorative programs should be able to distinguish them even when a patron or inscription does not. The theological cherub of the Old Testament (Ezekiel's vision, the guardians of Eden, the beings supporting the Mercy Seat) is a fearsome, many-winged, sometimes multi-faced being; in the celestial hierarchy set out by the fifth-century writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite — accepted by Aquinas and used by Dante — the Cherubim rank in the highest of the nine angelic orders, immediately below the Seraphim, distinguished by a fullness of divine knowledge rather than by any particular visual form. Byzantine and Orthodox iconography, when it depicts this order at all, renders it accordingly — as a stylized, many-eyed, six-winged form far removed from the chubby infant familiar from Western church decoration.
The decorative cherub — the winged child's head or small nude flying child that fills Renaissance and Baroque altarpieces, ceilings, and funerary monuments — descends instead from the classical putto (plural putti, from Latin putus, "boy"), itself derived from ancient representations of Eros, Amor, or Cupid on Roman funerary and decorative art. Donatello is generally credited with reintroducing the putto into Western sculpture around 1429, treating these figures initially as spiritelli — sprite-like attendant spirits — in a largely secular or ambiguously sacred register; by the Baroque period the putto had been thoroughly absorbed into Christian iconographic use, appearing as an attendant figure supporting cartouches, coats of arms, and inscriptions, emerging from carved clouds around an altarpiece, or flanking funerary portraits.
For the practicing decorative stone carver, the cherub head — carved emerging from carved clouds, supporting a cartouche, or flanking a funerary inscription — is one of the single most frequently commissioned elements in Catholic Baroque architectural sculpture, appearing on church facades, side altars, confessionals, and tomb monuments throughout the Italian, French, and broader Catholic tradition. Carving a convincing cherub head requires resolving a specific formal problem: an adult level of anatomical and expressive sophistication applied to unmistakably infant proportions (large cranium relative to face, soft unresolved musculature, chubby limbs), all while integrating believably with carved drapery, cloud-forms, or acanthus scrollwork around it.