When I first saw Dirck van Baburen’s Roman Charity, Cimon and Pero, it took me a long time to work out (or face up to) what was going on. In the painting – which appears in Real Families, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – an elderly man, obviously a prisoner, with his hands chained behind his back, is sucking on the nipple of a young woman who offers him her breast. She, meanwhile, turns her head away, as if she has been startled or has just realised that she has been discovered – perhaps sensing the presence of the figure, very likely the jailer, who is peering through the tiny barred window.
It should not have taken me so long to get the point. For this is a 17th-century version of an ancient Roman story, preserved in a collection of moralising anecdotes and exemplary tales of vice and virtue, compiled in the first century CE by Valerius Maximus, under the title Memorable Deeds and Sayings (Facta et dicta memorabilia). Though now little known outside the seminar or lecture room, it was once extremely popular. There are hundreds of medieval manuscripts of the collection (more than of any other Latin prose text apart from the Bible), and it was a bestseller across Europe in early printed editions, both in the original Latin and in translation.
Valerius Maximus tells this particular tale in the fifth book (out of nine), in a section devoted to stories of pietas, the usual Latin term not just for piety towards the gods, but as here for family loyalty, or duty to your parents. He explains that, when an old man by the name of Cimon (he is also sometimes known as Micon) was starving in prison, his daughter Pero visited and saved him, by suckling him with her own milk. It adds to the shock value for most modern viewers when they realise that the painting shows a daughter breastfeeding her own father.
But that is only part of it. In the same section on pietas, Valerius Maximus tells a variant of the same basic tale. An elderly woman, unnamed this time, was in prison, condemned to death. The jailer who had decided to kill her by starvation, rather than by strangling, allowed her daughter to continue to visit, provided she brought no food. He had not reckoned on the young woman feeding her mother from her own breasts. When this was discovered, the daughter’s pietas was deemed so impressive that, instead of further punishment, her mother was freed. We cannot now recover the historical facts behind these stories. Like many of the moral tales collected by Valerius Maximus, they are often now carefully described as “semi-mythical” or “highly embellished”. But, almost certainly, most Romans would have assumed they were true.
The scene of the father and daughter (though not of the mother and daughter) was common in Roman art. We find it on ceramics, and no fewer than six versions – a couple are now lost – have been discovered painted on the walls of houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But it was even more popular in later centuries, and especially prominent in European art from the 16th to the 18th century, often going under the title ‘Roman Charity’. There are hundreds of versions of it in museums and galleries, in paint and engraving, in porcelain, amber, marble and more.
You do not now see these as often as you might expect, given the number of them, for the simple reason that very many have ended up, out of view, in storerooms and basements. Curators tend to think that this version of family relations is not one that appeals to modern viewers. They may well be right. When I showed Van Baburen’s painting to a group, to gauge their reactions, the commonest response, after I had explained the story, was some version of “Ugggh”. A father suckling at his daughter’s breast does not now signal dutiful devotion. It is closer to incest, the right and proper order of the family turned upside down, the erotic and nurturing aspects of the breast uncomfortably confused.
For the most part, this scene remains on public display only when the artist is too famous to be consigned to the storeroom, or when the work of art concerned cannot easily be removed. Caravaggio’s version – in which the daughter is not actually inside the prison with her father but offers him her breast, from the outside, through the bars of the window – still survives in a church in Naples. Painted around 1607, it is part of the altarpiece, depicting the ‘Seven Works of Mercy’. Alongside burying the dead, sheltering the homeless and so on, visiting the imprisoned and feeding the hungry are symbolised by the scene of Cimon and Pero.
Not long after Caravaggio, Rubens produced five versions of ‘Roman Charity’ (the most famous, in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam – now thought to be largely the work of Rubens’s assistants – shows Pero turning away, but with her arm tenderly around her father as he sucks at her breast). Most aggressively public, as well as immovable, is the sculpture of the pair integrated into the façade of an 18th-century annexe to the medieval belfry in Ghent, above the doorway. The Mammelokker (‘Breast-sucker’), as the sculpture is popularly called, has given its name to this whole part of the building, which once formed the entrance to the city prison. What on earth the prisoners, their families or their guards made of this rather stern image of the daughter feeding her chained father is hard to know.
That raises the question of what the scene, and the underlying story, is all about. What is it saying about the ancient family, or the modern? One argument is that in the Roman world, as Valerius Maximus suggests, the story of Cimon and Pero (and the version with the anonymous mother) represented the highest form of family love and the greatest service a daughter could provide for her parents. That is the implication of the modern title, ‘Roman Charity’, too – charity or caritas, in the sense of selfless love.
But, even in the ancient stories and paintings, there are hints that it was more complicated. There is a shadow of incest here and of family relations gone wrong, and a sense that the images of Cimon and Pero could be unsettling to Roman viewers, as they are to us. Even Valerius Maximus points to the perhaps uncomfortable oddity of what is said to have happened. This is “strange”, he writes of the case of daughter and mother, “unheard of”. And referring explicitly to paintings of the scene, he recognises that people do admire the example of virtue when they look at the father and daughter, but that they are also “confounded” by them (the Latin word stupent has a range of meanings from “amazed” to “aghast”). Some of that ambivalence is vividly captured by a painting that still survives in Pompeii.
This is in the ‘House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto’, a large property and particularly elegantly decorated. The painting of Pero nursing her father is a panel in the centre of one of the walls of a small room in the more public area of the house, just off the central hall or atrium. It is now badly damaged, but enough remains for us to be certain that the old man was shown sitting on the floor at his daughter’s feet, suckling from one breast while his hand touched the other through her clothing.
Better preserved is the six-line Latin poem, painted in white letters in the upper left-hand corner, which offered a commentary on the scene (here calling the father ‘Micon’). The first four lines explain that “unfair Fortune” has turned food for infants into food for a father and they highlight his veins swelling as he draws on his daughter’s milk. But a careful reading of the final two lines gives a different view. For they point out that, with their faces brought together, she is “caressing” him. Or so some modern translations put it. In fact, that misses (or disguises) the sense of the word fricat, which means something much closer to “rub” – and which is also used in Latin with an explicitly sexual sense (“rub up”). In other words, it exposes the erotic side of the image, one that is confirmed by the last line of the poem: “there is sad shame [pudor] along with the filial devotion [pietas] here”. The poem is asking viewers to confront what kind of love between father and daughter we are witnessing. Can it ever be as innocent as is sometimes assumed? How shameful is it?
In many modern images of Cimon and Pero too, the apparent innocence of the title ‘Roman Charity’ is undermined by the details of the painting. The jailer usually appears, as in Van Baburen’s picture, as a leering face (or faces) through the bars of the tiny window. In part, this was guided by the logic of the story. The whole point is that the daughter’s devotion was discovered. But it adds an inescapable element of voyeurism to the scene, which has the effect of recasting it in erotic terms, while suggesting to the viewers of the painting that they see themselves as voyeurs too. And the figure of Pero straddles the line between devoted daughter, embarrassed participant and complicit partner. Van Baburen, as many artists do, makes her turn away.
Again, there is a narrative logic here: she is startled as she realises that she has been spotted, but her pose also suggests that she cannot bear to look at what she is doing. In other paintings she looks directly at her father, tenderly embracing him (Rubens’s first version of ‘Roman Charity’ is one of those), or her pose displays her breasts fully frontal to the viewer. From the father’s side, the relief on his face, as he drinks his daughter’s milk, could to some eyes look as much like an orgasm as a welcome quenching of thirst and hunger (not unlike the “swelling veins” of the poem in Pompeii, perhaps). In one or two modern versions (for example, a 17th-century design for a cup by Thomas de Bry) the veil of propriety was literally removed, and the pair appeared entirely naked.
I admit that I find it quite hard to look at the images of ‘Roman Charity’. It feels far too much like a ringside seat at incest or even child-abuse. All the same, it is important to try to explain their huge (albeit now concealed) popularity. What was driving the repeated return to this image, in the modern or the ancient world? The bottom line is that the story of Cimon and Pero was one focus of a debate about the nature of the family, about how the erotic life within it could be (or should be) policed, and about the very nature of love between parent and child.
There are lessons here for us. I do not mean that we ought necessarily to pay more attention to this story and the issues that it highlights – though I suspect it would add usefully to our conversations if we did, unsettling as we may find it. The bigger point is that these texts and (especially) images are a wonderful antidote to the “presentism” that can beset the history of the family, as it besets so many other histories. It is very easy to imagine that, before our own day, the family was a traditional, perhaps conservative but relatively uncontested unit; and that it is only now that we have questioned that or tried to change it. The fact is that Cimon and Pero were asking viewers and readers to think harder about what a family was and what its rules were 250 – and 2,000 – years ago. They are a useful reminder that the family has never been uncontroversial, has always been in flux.
There is, however, a sting in the tail. Paintings of Cimon and Pero may now be very largely forgotten, consigned to museum basements, hardly recognised, and certainly not popular. But the scene has a cameo role in a painting that is one of the best known in the world. That is Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, also now known as The Music Lesson, painted in the 1660s. Here a young woman plays the virginals, with her back to us, her face reflected in the mirror above the instrument; to her right stands an older man listening and perhaps singing (though there is no reason to suppose that he is her teacher as the common modern title implies). Just behind his head, at the far right-hand side of the canvas, Vermeer has depicted a framed painting hanging on the wall. Although only just under half of this is visible to us (we have to imagine the rest extending beyond the canvas’s edge), it is absolutely clear that it is another known version of Cimon and Pero by Dirck van Baburen. It is very similar to the one in the Fitzwilliam exhibition, though in this case the father is on the left, the daughter on the right: we can make out the man’s back and chained arms, instantly recognisable, and part of Pero’s head.
Why did Vermeer copy this painting into Lady at the Virginals? We know that his family owned one of Van Baburen’s versions of the scene. But we need a more driving reason than that he just happened to have the picture to hand. What is it saying about what is happening in the rest of the painting? Perhaps it is a hint that the listening man is as much a prisoner (of his desires) as Cimon. Is it only the young woman who will be able to sustain him (physically or spiritually)? Or is it a warning that what might seem at first sight to be an innocent relationship will turn out to be far less so? Whatever the answer, Vermeer and his audience were using this now largely forgotten story to think about their own personal and family dilemmas.
This is an edited extract from the catalogue for Real Families: Stories of Change at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The exhibition runs from Oct 6 until Jan 7. Details: fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
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