Charity the Educator

Charity in older Italian art is usually a mother feeding infants. Bartolini's Charity holds a small child on her right arm and, with the other, teaches an older one to read from a scroll. The group was commissioned in 1817, soon after the Lorraine grand dukes returned to Tuscany, for a niche in the new chapel of the villa of Poggio Imperiale, just south of Florence. What this full-size plaster shows is a mother as teacher, and critics of the time praised it for exactly that, the patience of a woman guiding a child's mind. Its models are Florentine sculptors of the 1400s such as Donatello, more than the statues of ancient Rome. The work took until 1824, and the marble never reached the villa. In 1835 Grand Duke Leopold II decided it was too fine for a chapel niche and had it placed in Palazzo Pitti, where it belongs to the Palatine Gallery. The niche at Poggio Imperiale holds a copy.