The Charity of Saint Lawrence

The story comes from the Passion of Saint Lawrence, a deacon of the Church of Rome, and it spread through collections of saints' lives such as the Golden Legend. In the year 258, during the persecution under the emperor Valerian, Pope Sixtus II asked Lawrence to give the Church's treasures away to the poor so that they could not be confiscated, and Lawrence himself was martyred that same year. Strozzi painted the subject many times, and the museum counts this canvas, dated to between 1615 and 1620, among the earliest and finest of his versions. The whole scene turns on hands, contrasted as sharply as the light. Lawrence's hands give, and the hands of the old beggar receive, humbly. Devotional writers of the 17th century often spoke of the hand of the poor, manus pauperis, as the place where an act of charity worked for the giver's salvation, and the museum reads the picture as an image of that idea. The Italian state bought the canvas in 1911.