A Cardinal's Dwarf

We were looking at a painting today, Panini's "Interior of a Picture Gallery," when a woman muttered, "What is that?" We looked more closely at the painting which depicted the many arts works belonging to a cardinal (Because of course someone from the church should be surrounded by worldly possessions). It turned out tha the object of her attention was a small male figure male dressed very much like the cardinal in the painting. We asked the docent conducting the tour: "Is that little boy? Or is it a dwarf?" She casually responded, "Oh, that. He's the cardinal's dwarf" and then moved on as if we should all have known that cardinals often had dwarfs in their courts.