Charity

In 1772 Johan Zoffany, a painter working for Queen Charlotte in London, came to Florence to paint the Tribuna, the octagonal treasure room of the Uffizi. He treated the job as a summary of the Medici collection rather than a record of one room. Seven canvases were carried across the river from the Galleria Palatina in the Pitti and worked into his composition, and this Charity is one of them, high on the left-hand wall. Reni had painted it around 1611. The museum's own record still prints that date with a question mark. It is the old allegory of the virtue, a woman with three small children, and Reni came back to the subject nearly twenty years later in a version now in New York. Zoffany's crowded view stayed in Britain, in the royal collection. The Charity went back over the river, and hangs in the Sala di Ulisse.