Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture by Jutta Gisela Sperling (review)

Around 31 ce, Valerius Maximus included two curious tales in his Memorable Doings and Sayings that would fascinate artists and writers alike for centuries. In both stories, an adult woman breastfeeds her parent (in one, her mother; in the other, her father) to save the parent from starvation in prison. Whilst the story lived on primarily in written formats in the Middle Ages, it became exceptionally popular as a subject for early modern artists. Sperling has written a book that both documents this popularity and provides provocative suggestions regarding its causes and effects.

The subject is certainly transgressive, in particular because the guilt of the parents is uncertain, and so the justice of the daughter's milk offering is hazy, though the idea that the daughter represents filial piety was soon introduced to the accounts in their retellings. But in the early modern period, a uniquely religious spin is put on the Pero/Cimon story (the daughter/father story) as well as on the daughter/mother story, as they are depicted in various forms of visual culture: Pero becomes the model for the Christian Church's prime virtue, Charity.

Sperling recognizes the problematic nature of this model for religious virtue, whether in the same-sex or opposite-sex versions. In both accounts, eroticism is lurking just below the surface, with the lactating breasts and suckling adults, as well as an uncomfortable inversion of the parent/child family structures of responsibility and authority. Moreover, in the daughter/mother account, a not-very-subtle expression of homoeroticism is obvious, while in the daughter/father account, the specter of incest cannot be ignored. It is this tension between Christian allegorization and visual shock and even titillation that primarily intrigues Sperling, and for which she seeks an explanation.

Sperling addresses her subject by dividing the book into two sections. Part I (Chapters 1–3) is an account of the depictions of the story in early modern visual culture. Chapter 1 shows the first early modern interest in Pero and Cimon (1525–1550) expressed with relative fidelity to the stories (the depictions are clearly prison scenes, and Pero is inside the prison), but also in some cases (such as the prints of the Beham brothers) as intentionally eroticized, and in others (such as the painting by the Master with Griffin's Head) as comparable to strong, and emasculating, women of the Bible such as Judith, Delilah, and Salome. Caravaggio's depiction of Pero and Cimon, Sperling notes in Chapter 2, is a turning point, for the simple fact that he places the imagery in the context of his altarpiece, The Seven Works of Mercy, inserting the Roman story into a specifically Christian context. Sperling suggests, convincingly, that this work, when considered with Caravaggio's other religious paintings (in particular The Denial of Saint Peter, The Calling of Saint Matthew, and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas) "was meant as a figure of dissent vis-à-vis mainstream post-Tridentine Catholicism" (107), in great part because he "secularizes and politicizes Charity by couching Pero as the breastfeeding Madonna's successor… whose needy father, awaiting nurture, renewal, and redemption, is a Saint Peter look-alike" (180). Following this transformative "Caravaggesque moment," as Sperling calls it, the theme of Pero and Cimon grows arguably even more popular, perhaps because it is picked up by Rubens, Manfredi, Reni, and others—but the scene loses the subversive elements that Caravaggio included. Poussin famously included a daughter/mother breastfeeding scene in The Gathering of the Manna, and Sperling identifies in Chapter 3 the "long shadows" of both Caravaggio and Poussin. Poussin's "aim was to produce a Roman Charity … purged of all irony" in contradistinction to Caravaggio's distinctly polemical version (182). This does not mean however that there was not an element of dissent in the later depictions. Rather, the French visual tradition of parental breastfeeding was, Sperling suggests, a response to the debates of "paternal power and the reform of the monarchy...