La Charité romaine

The scene looks shocking until you know the old Roman story behind it. A man named Cimon, jailed and sentenced to starve to death, is kept alive in secret by his daughter Pero, who visits and nurses him at her breast, and Roman writers held her up as the height of devotion to a parent. Rubens painted this around 1612, not long after he came home to Antwerp from years in Italy, where he had absorbed Caravaggio's dark, close-up drama. He was far from alone in the subject, since a craze for painting Pero and Cimon swept Europe in exactly those years. Rubens turns Pero's head toward the doorway, so that even in this act of mercy she is watching for the guard.