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

Roman Charity—both the first-century Roman story and the hundreds of visual images it inspired—is deeply, unremittingly disturbing: at once redemptive and transgressive, moralizing and erotic, compelling and repulsive, it fascinates and disgusts at the same time. What came in the Christian world to be called Roman Charity began as two brief stories told in Valerius Maximus's first-century Memorable Sayings and Doings, in which a father (or mother, in another, less replicated version), condemned to death by starvation for some capital offense, is fed—breastfed—by his (or her) daughter, who thereby both provides physical nourishment and, in the same-sex version, becomes the catalyst of her parent's release, the authorities having been moved to mercy by her astonishing act of filial piety. Although the narrative endured, it was the visual representation of the breastfeeding scene that proliferated widely in the early modern period: images of old men, ribs protruding through emaciated skin, feet bound by shackles, lips pursed almost to a kiss, just barely touching the exposed, often erect nipple of a young, firm breast. Frequently, the daughter looks away as she offers her breast and her father prepares to suckle. It is outrageous. And riveting.

Jutta Sperling has been obsessed for well over a decade, and we should be grateful for the hold Roman Charity in its many manifestations has had on her; in that time, she has amassed an archive of well over 1000 instances, both verbal and visual, that, although focused on the early modern period, actually spans nearly two millennia. Sperling does present an argument about Roman Charity, but the real accomplishment of her work is that she has so painstakingly created the collection itself. The motif appears on medals, ceramics, frescoes, in book illustrations, and, especially, in oil paintings; one gets a sense of the motif's longue durée, especially in its Cimon/Pero, father/daughter form. Reading Sperling's volume, one feels that she has spent time carefully thinking about each example. Roman Charity is an indispensable text for anyone interested in this motif or in lactation imagery more generally.

Sperling's formidable facility with verbal description enhances her project. She offers detailed, exacting renditions in terms that powerfully convey the tone, texture, and emotive energy of each piece. In one Mannerist image, for example, the folds of Pero's "silken skirt" are "wonderfully complicated and unnecessarily abundant," suggesting an erotic charge to the young woman's otherwise "sweet devotion" (139); in an eroticized rendering of the Biblical Judith, a "strong woman" with whom Pero was sometimes associated, the Biblical hero is "butt-naked, sitting on Holofernes's bare chest" (59). The volume is lavishly illustrated, mostly in color, and most descriptions are paired with accompanying images. Sperling's verbal renderings are so vivid, so engagingly portrayed, however, that the effect is achieved even without them.

Driven by the charged response that the motif inevitably arouses—and attentive to the tension between that emotive response and the easy moralizing of its putative allegorical meanings (filial piety, Christian charity)—Sperling sees Roman Charity as a vehicle of dissent, an intervention into reigning normative social structures. In each instance, this critique plays out in fairly specific ways. In the case of Caravaggio, to take just one example, the motif becomes a means of registering anti-papal heterodoxy in the post-Tridentine Church. Including the motif in his altarpiece, The Seven Works of Mercy, at the Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, Caravaggio represents the secular Pero as the embodiment of Charity at the expense of the Virgin Mary, who looks on from above "with a rather stern expression, frowning" (116). Caravaggio thus not only counters the pattern of "Tridentine image theory," which required a "veneration-worthy" central figure, but also offers a secular substitute for a sacred Christian ideal (125). Sperling further notes a strikingly visual similarity...