Allegory of Charity, by Nicola Vaccaro (Naples, 1640 – 1709)

Circle of Carlo Cignani (Bologna, 1628 – Forlì, 1719)

Allegory of Charity, by Nicola Vaccaro (Naples, 1640 – 1709)

Oil on canvas, 119 x 93 cm

With frame, 137 x 110 cm

The painter Carlo Cignani, originally from Bologna, trained with Giovanni Battista del Cairo and Francesco Albani, was strongly influenced by the most famous Emilian painters active in his century and the previous one, namely Annibale Carracci, Correggio and, for the perspective from below in the top as well as for the use of color, Melozzo da Forlì. After the first period of training spent mainly in the Bolognese area, in the early 1672s Cignani moved to Rome, where his works in Baroque style were widely appreciated and where he obtained the title of prince of the Accademia di San Luca. The artist's late mature years were spent between Bologna, his hometown, and Parma. He spent his last period in Forlì, also for the creation of his great masterpiece, the fresco of the dome of the chapel of the Madonna del Fuoco in the Cathedral. In the Pinacoteca civica of Forlì, instead, you can see the canvas of the Coronation of Saint Rose and a Self-portrait. His, but probably with the help of his son Felice Cignani, is the Virgin and Saint Philip Neri, in the same art gallery. Then there is Aurora flying towards the blue to bring light and life to the world (1674-XNUMX), in the Albicini palace, also in Forlì: Aurora represents at its highest level the very refined formal idealism of Cignani, thus resulting in one of the most beautiful figurative inventions of seventeenth-century Italian art.

In this beautiful painting, most likely executed between the end of the 70th century and the beginning of the 1603th century, the artist, who takes from Cignani the monumentality of the figures and the classicism of Carracci origin that characterizes the development of XNUMXth-century Bolognese painting, takes up a composition conceived around the XNUMXs by the Neapolitan artist Nicola Vaccaro. In Vaccaro's Allegory of Charity, currently preserved at the National Museum of Medieval and Modern Art of Basilicata in Matera, as per tradition, Charity is represented as a young girl who takes care of three children. In his famous Iconologia, a crucial text from XNUMX, Ripa describes Charity as a "woman dressed in a red dress" who "will hold a Child in her left arm, to whom she will give milk, and two others will be playing at her feet". The three children, according to this author, “demonstrate that although Charity is only one virtue, it nevertheless has tripled power”.