Charity

1743/44

Francesco de Mura
Italian, 1696-1782

This painting presents an allegory of the virtue of charity through images of maternal love and sacrifice: a mother nurtures several young children and a pelican feeds her young by drawing blood from her own breast. This work was one of a set of allegories of five virtues intended as decorations set above doors in a palace belonging to the king of Savoy, a region in northwest Italy. Francesco de Mura spent most of his career in Naples but also worked for the king of Savoy in the 1740s, producing paintings in a style that combined grand, calm figures with active drapery. Although it is now rectangular, the canvas shows signs of an earlier curved shape appropriate to a Rococo room decoration.

Status: On View, Gallery 215
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Francesco de Mura
Title: Charity
Place: Italy (Artist's nationality)
Date: 1743–1744
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 139.5 × 134.6 cm (54 15/16 × 53 in.)
Credit Line: Preston O. Morton Memorial Fund for Older Paintings
Reference Number: 1971.429
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Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Report, 1970–71, Chicago, 1971, pp. 26–27 (ill.).
Country Life, June 3, 1971.
The Golden age of Naples: art and civilization under the Bourbons 1734–1805, exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts and Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit, 1981, pp. 129–130, no. 34.
Franco Mormando, “Introduction: Response to the Plauge in Early Modern Italy: What Primary Sources, Printed, Painted Reveal,” Hope and Healing: painting in Italy in a Time of Plauge, Exh. Cat ( Worcester Art Museum, 2005), p. 27, p. 194-195, cat. 9.
A Taste for Angels. Neapolitan Painting in North America 1650–1750, exh. cat., Yale University Art Gallery, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, New Haven, 1987, p. 262, fig. 114.
Sandra Pinto, Arte di Corte a Torino da Carlo Emanuele II a Carlo Felice, Turin, 1987, p. 21.
Mercedes Precerutti Garberi, Arte antica e moderna nelle collezioni della Banca Commerciale Italiana. Dal quattrocento al settecento, Milan, 1998, pp. 262–63.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, et al., Hope and Healing. Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500–1800, exh. cat., Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, 2005, pp. 27, 194–95, no. 9 (ill.).
Arthur R. Blumenthal, In the Light of Naples: The Art of Francesco de Mura, ext. cat. (Winter Park: The Cornell Fine Arts Museum; London: D Giles Limited, 2016), 24, 42n28, 78, 134-35 cat. 19, 142, 152.

Naples, Ente provinciale del Turismo, 1938, ill.
London, Heim Gallery, May 13–August 28, 1971, no. 14.
Detroit, Institute of Arts, The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization under the Bourbons 1734–1805, August 11–November 1, 1981, no. 34; traveled to Chicago, Art Institute, January 16–March 8, 1982.
Worcester, Massachusetts, Art Museum, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500–1800, April 3–September 25, 2005, cat. 9 (ill.).
Winter Park, Florida, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, In the Light of Naples: The Art of Francesco de Mura, September 17–December 18, 2016, cat. 19; Madison, Chazen Museum of Art, January 20–April 2, 2017; Arlington, NY, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, April 21–July 2, 2017 [Winter Park and Madison only]

Probably commissioned by Charles Emmanuel III, Turin [see Pinto 1987]. Peretti, Rome, by 1971 [according to Heim Commission Book at the Getty Research Institute]; Heim Gallery, London, 1971; sold to the Art Institute, 1971.

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