page_title: Roman Charity
section_title: Same-sex Version
hierarchical_section_title: Roman Charity / Same-sex Version
context_page_description: Roman Charity is the exemplary story of a woman, Pero, who secretly breastfeeds her father, Cimon, after he is incarcerated and sentenced to death by starvation.
context_section_description: During this period of prolific engagement with the imagery of Pero and Cimon, Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) stands out because of his rendering of the breastfeeding mother-daughter couple in The Gathering of the Manna (1639). Poussin’s choice of subject matter demonstrated his knowledge of Maximus’s other example of filial piety, as well as earlier French renderings of the theme. It is possible that Poussin was familiar with the print by Étienne Delaune (1518/19–88) and/or, perhaps, the “Histoire Rommaine” printed in Lyon in 1548, in which a mother begs her daughter to let her nurse at her breast – a request the daughter rebukes, challenging her mother to display greater dignity in her suffering, before ultimately succumbing and allowing her mother to suckle. 
  Similar to later depictions of Pero and Cimon, which contain the addition of Pero’s child in order to dissuade any incestuous or salacious readings, Poussin includes the daughter’s son, who competes with his grandmother for his mother’s milk. In doing so, and in adding an observer whose reaction belays the correct reading of the scene as one of filial piety, Poussin preempts the potential reading of the scene as lesbian – harkening back to the debate Maximus proposes between the onlooking guards. Despite the fact that Poussin positioned himself as the opposite of Caravaggio, he, like his rival, integrated Maximus’s story into a complex religious painting.
  While the choice to depict the mother-daughter scene as opposed to that of Pero and Cimon was unique at the time that Poussin was painting, the same-sex version enjoyed wider popularity than the father-daughter scene during the middle ages and into the early modern period. The medieval work Girard de Rossillon, by an anonymous, tells the story of the imprisoned mother, nursed by her daughter but embellishes it, inventing a name for the daughter – bone Berte – and a noble lineage for the family. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writers Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) both used the story of the Roman daughter as a story of reciprocal kinship relations. In the sixteenth century Hans Sachs produced an eroticized work on the scene.
  Few works depicting the mother-daughter version were made between the seventeenth and late eighteenth century. A poem by Sibylla Schwarz(1612-38) on egalitarian relationships among women uses the anecdote. A few years after Poussin’s painting of The Gathering of the Manna, Guercino produced an intimate portrait of the mother and daughter (before 1661). This is the last known depiction of the scene before its brief resurgence in the late eighteenth century when three paintings by Jean-Charles Nicaise Perrin (1791, lost), Angelika Kauffmann (1794, lost), and Etienne-Barthélemy Garnier (1801, lost) were made depicting the scene. Perhaps this brief resurgence of interest can be explained by a French Revolutionary theme of political equality which found resonance in the reciprocity within kinship relations that the mother-daughter version displayed. The reversal of patriarchal relations that Pero and Cimon could be seen as symbolizing, while meaningful under the ancient regime, was now passé.
caption: The Gathering of the Manna in the Desert (c.1639)
exif: {}