Allegory of Charity

This large canvas spent most of its life out of public sight. It came up for sale in Madrid on 16 June 1997, one of 286 lots at the Sala Retiro auction rooms, and the Spanish State stepped in with its right of pre-emption and took it for 105 million pesetas, something over half a million euros in the money that replaced them. It entered the Prado that year. Zurbarán painted it around 1655, late in his working life, and the subject is Charity, shown as a young woman carrying a heart in flames, the attribute that identified the virtue for any Spanish churchgoer of the period. The museum's own record notes a white dove in the picture. In 2000 it travelled to Bilbao for an exhibition built entirely around Zurbarán's final years, and in 2006 to Tokyo and Osaka.