Roman Charity

Roman Charity is the name of a story, and the picture makes no sense without it. An old man called Cimon has been sentenced to starve to death in prison. His daughter Pero comes to visit him and feeds him at her own breast. The Roman writer Valerius Maximus set it down as a model of what a child owes a parent, and in his account the authorities who discovered what she was doing released the old man and raised a temple to filial piety on the spot.

The Prado dates the canvas between 1620 and 1630 and gives it to Gaspar de Crayer, a Fleming who made his career in Brussels. It has not always carried his name. By 1746 it belonged to Isabel de Farnesio, queen of Spain, and hung at the palace of La Granja as number 745, catalogued as a Jusepe de Ribera. It was still a Ribera at Aranjuez in 1794. When a lithograph of it was published in Madrid between 1829 and 1832, the line under the image named Benedetto Crespi, and the museum inventory of 1857 repeated that.

The number 745 is still legible at the lower left of the canvas, which is how the picture can be tracked back through those lists.