Original text : (Automatic translation)
Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617 Seville 1682), Roman Charity. Oil on canvas. This oil sketch for Murillo's Caritas Romana, and a related drawing in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, are all that remain of a once-famous composition whose picaresque history ended with its destruction by fire at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1845.

A rare classical subject in Murillo's oeuvre, the theme of Roman Charity is based on the text of Valerius Masimus (Factorum et Dictorum, Book IV, V, 4) which describes how the Roman matron Pero saved the life of her dying father, Cimon, who had been condemned to death by starvation, by giving suckle from her breast. The theme, which was a common subject among the northern followers of Caravaggio, is usually interpreted as an allegory of filial love, but it has been noted that Caravaggio himself included it in his masterpiece The Seven Acts of Mercy (Capodimonte, Naples) as a reference to the charitable act of “feeding the hungry.” It is generally agreed that Murillo based his composition on several engravings after Rubens's Caritas Romana in the Hermitage, but Enriqueta Harris, while acknowledging this, has astutely observed the differences between the compositions by Rubens and Murillo, and between Murillo's own preparatory drawing and the finished painting. In the drawing, the matron touches her breast with her right hand, while in the oil sketch and the finished painting she extends her drapery with her right hand, partially covering the nakedness of her father. Thus, Murillo has invoked another of the Seven Acts of Mercy - “clothing the naked”- in giving further Christian resonance to this classical subject.

In 1807 Murillo's Caritas Romana was in the Madrid collection of Manuel Godoy, Príncipe de la Paz. At the time of Godoy's overthrow by the French, the painting was sent to the Calcografía Nacional, where it was engraved by Tomás López Enguídanos.