The ultimate act of love?

Since Roman times, artists have been inspired by the uneasy story of a woman who breastfeeds her own father. Here’s why

When I first saw Dirck van Baburen’s Roman Charity, Cimon and Pero, it took me a long time to work out (or face up to) what was going on. In the painting – which appears in Real Families, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – an elderly man, obviously a prisoner, with his hands chained behind his back, is sucking on the nipple of a young woman who offers him her breast. She, meanwhile, turns her head away, as if she has been startled or has just realised that she has been discovered – perhaps sensing the presence of the figure, very likely the jailer, who is peering through the tiny barred window.

It should not have taken me so long to get the point. For this is a 17th-century version of an ancient Roman story, preserved in a collection of moralising anecdotes and exemplary tales of vice and virtue, compiled in the first century AD by Valerius Maximus, under the title Memorable Deeds and Sayings (Facta et dicta memorabilia). Though now little known outside the seminar or lecture room, it was once extremely popular. There are hundreds of medieval manuscripts of the collection (more than of any other Latin prose text apart from the Bible), and it was a bestseller across Europe in early printed editions, both in the original Latin and in translation.

Valerius Maximus tells this particular tale in the fifth book (out of nine), in a section devoted to stories of pietas, the usual Latin term not just for piety towards the gods, but as here for family loyalty, or duty to your parents. He explains that, when an old man by the name of Cimon (he is also sometimes known as Micon) was starving in prison, his daughter Pero visited and saved him, by suckling him with her own milk. It adds to the shock value for most modern viewers when they realise that the painting shows a daughter breastfeeding her own father.

But that is only part of it. In the same section on pietas, Valerius Maximus tells a variant of the same basic tale. An elderly woman, unnamed this time, was in prison, condemned to death. The jailer who had decided to kill her by starvation, rather than by strangling, allowed her daughter to continue to visit, provided she brought no food. He had not reckoned on the young woman feeding her mother from her own breasts. When this was discovered, the daughter’s pietas was deemed so impressive that, instead of further punishment, her mother was freed. We cannot now recover the historical facts behind these stories. Like many of the moral tales collected by Valerius Maximus, they are often now carefully described as “semi-mythical” or “highly embellished”. But, almost certainly, most Romans would have assumed they were true.

The scene of the father and daughter (though not of the mother and daughter) was common in Roman art. We find it on ceramics, and no fewer than six versions – a couple are now lost – have been discovered painted on the walls of houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But it was even more popular in later centuries, and especially prominent in European art from the 16th to the 18th century, often going under the title ‘Roman Charity’. There are hundreds of versions of it in museums and galleries, in paint and engraving, in porcelain, amber, marble and more. You do not now see these as often as you might expect, given the number of them, for the simple reason that very many have ended up, out of view, in storerooms and basements. Curators tend to think that this version of family relations is not one that appeals to modern viewers. They may well be right. When I showed Van Baburen’s painting to a group, to gauge their reactions, the commonest response, after I had explained the story, was some version of “Ugggh”. A father suckling at his daughter’s breast does not now signal dutiful devotion. It is closer to incest, the right and proper order of the family turned upside down, the erotic and nurturing aspects of the breast uncomfortably confused.

For the most part, this scene remains on public display only when the artist is too famous to be consigned to the storeroom, or when the work of art concerned cannot easily be removed. Caravaggio’s version – in which the daughter is not actually inside the prison with her father but offers him her breast, from the outside, through the bars of the window – still survives in a church in Naples. Painted around 1607, it is part of the altarpiece, depicting

I find it hard to look at. It feels too much like a ringside seat at incest