Roman Charity by Ter Brugghen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2023

Title: Roman Charity

Artist: Hendrick ter Brugghen (Dutch, The Hague? 1588–1629 Utrecht)

Date: 1622

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 58 1/8 × 54 1/8 in. (147.6 × 137.5 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Wrightsman Fund, 2020

Accession Number: 2020.320


A woman kneels to nurse her elderly father, his hands shackled behind his back. These are Cimon, a man sentenced to death by starvation, and his daughter Pero, who defies both the law and social taboo to save her father’s life. Recorded by the Roman historian Valerius Maximus, this potentially shocking episode was celebrated in seventeenth-century Europe as an exemplar of filial piety. Ter Brugghen emphasizes the solemnity of the scene at the same time as he hints at lurking danger through the inclusion of a barely visible voyeur figure in the background.
Roman Charity, Hendrick ter Brugghen (Dutch, The Hague? 1588–1629 Utrecht), Oil on canvas

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/834308