Jutta Sperling, Maribel Peñalver Vicea, Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goulet, and Mireille Calle-Gruber (eds.)

Proposals by 15.10.2018

„He knelt down in front of her. She leaned towards him and with a practised gesture pushed the dark tip of her breast towards his mouth. With the movement she made with both hands to proffer her breast to the man a drop of milk appeared at the crown. He licked it greedily then, as if on a fruit, closed his lips on the heavy breast. Regularly and deeply he began to suck. He put both arms around the woman’s waist so as to bring her closer to him and drank in long, slow draughts, making movements with his neck like a baby.“ Guy de Maupassant: Idyll (1884)

Surprisingly, very little academic attention has been paid to the iconographical theme of Roman Charity, which emerged in Renaissance art and became particularly popular in the Baroque. More than three hundred artistic representations of Pero and Cimon are currently extant in European museums and collections (in various forms: oil paintings, drawings, medals, book illuminations, prints, marble statues, frescoes, decorative dishes), but studies dealing with this motif, going back to ancient Rome, are extremely limited.

The anecdote, which served as textual reference … read more and source (Web)