Roman charity

roman school

Critics have variously attributed this painting to Girolamo Muziano, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi and Giovan Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino. First mentioned in connection with the Borghese Collection in 1693, the canvas depicts so-called Roman Charity, a subject taken from a legend of ancient Rome that narrates the story of Cimon and Pero. The latter was the courageous and beautiful Roman woman who sought to save her elderly father, who had been condemned to die of hunger, by feeding him with the milk of her breast. His jailers were so touched by her act that they decided to free the old Cimon. The gesture was celebrated by the ancients as an example of pietas.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this work is still unknown. It is first documented in the context of the Borghese Collection in 1693, when the inventory of that year lists it as ‘a painting of roughly 4 spans with Roman Charity breastfeeding an old man in handcuffs, at number 62, with a gilded frame, by Mutiani’. While the name of Mutiani, alias Girolamo Muziano da Brescia, was immediately dropped in the 18th-century inventories, in which the work is described as ‘in the style of Veronese’, it again appeared in both the Inventario Fidecommissario (1833) and the profiles by Giovanni Piancastelli (1891).

Perhaps basing his opinion of the work’s subject, Adolfo Venturi (1893) rejected an attribution to the area of Veneto, rather proposing that it was a product of ‘Roman art of the 17th century’. Following Venturi’s lead, Roberto Longhi suggested Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an artist from Viterbo who had come under the influence of Caravaggio. Both this name and that of Guercino (Ramdhor 1787; Vasi 1792) were, however, rejected by Paola della Pergola (1959), who cautiously revived Venturi’s idea, publishing the work in the catalogue of paintings of the Galleria Borghese as by a ‘Roman master’ close to the circle of late Roman Mannerism.

After being forgotten by critics for decades, the work drew the attention of Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2006), who proposed that it was by an anonymous ‘Sienese master’. Yet various elements, such as a timid adhesion to naturalism and to the use of light in the style of Caravaggio – mediated by Emilian influences – suggest that we must locate the work in Roman circles of the early 1620s, a context in which Caravaggio’s followers had adopted a softer, more intimate idiom. At the same time, the canvas shows a certain affinity to the culture of Veneto, which in fact motivated the attributions of the first Borghese inventories: not by chance was it listed as ‘in the style of Veronese’, in reference in all likelihood not to Paolo Caliari but to Alessandro Turchi, who was also referred to as ‘il Veronese’. Alessandro was in fact born in Verona in 1578 and is documented as having been in Rome beginning in 1616, where he distanced himself from the late-Mannerist figurative culture and took part in the innovations heralded by Caravaggio, developing a style that was much appreciated by painters active in Rome at that time.

Antonio Iommelli