Allegory of Charity

A mother nurtures several young children while a pelican feeds her young by drawing blood from her own breast — in the emblem language of the eighteenth century, the pelican’s self-sacrifice made it the supreme image of charity. Francesco de Mura, the leading Neapolitan painter of the mid-eighteenth century, executed this canvas as one of a set of allegories of five virtues intended as overdoor decorations in a palace belonging to the king of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel III, probably in Turin; the series shows him translating the grand manner of his teacher Francesco Solimena into a lighter, more decorative idiom. The canvas was with the Peretti family in Rome by 1971, was sold by the Heim Gallery, London, to the Art Institute of Chicago that year, and was purchased with funds from the Preston O. Morton Memorial Fund for Older Paintings. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.