Allegorical Figure of Charity

In 1929 the Italian art historian Adolfo Venturi illustrated this small Charity in his history of Italian art, in one of the volumes on 16th-century painting, as the property of the Casa d'Arte Volterra, a dealer's gallery in Florence. By the next year it belonged to Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, the Italian dealer and collector from whom the American collector Samuel Kress bought many of his Italian paintings. In May 1930 Contini Bonacossi sold it, together with its companion of the same size showing Faith, to a Boston collector. Under her will the pair came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1964.