Cimon and Pero

Entry

McGrath has reviewed the classical and Renaissance treatments of the subject depicted in the present painting, which is mistakenly called Roman Charity. It derives chiefly from Valerius Maximus (first century CE), who gave it as an example of devotion towards parents (pietas in parentes).¹² Valerius’s example from Roman history – his main focus – recorded how a mother, who had been condemned to death but was being more benignly starved by her gaoler rather than executed, was kept alive by her daughter who secretly breast fed her. On discovery of the fact by her gaoler the matter was reported to the authorities, who in recognition of this extraordinary display of filial piety remitted the mother’s capital sentence.

This was Valerius’s Roman Charity; but the subject that was favoured by Renaissance and post-Renaissance artists was the non-Roman example that concerned Pero and her imprisoned, elderly father Cimon (as Peter Paul Rubens would probably have known him, although the name was already recognized in the seventeenth-century as a transposition of Micon);¹³ thus Cimon, in a similar predicament to the Roman mother, was saved in the same way by his daughter.

Rubens treated the subject perhaps as many as five times, of which he retained one example for his own collection (see above); no other is found in inventories of seventeenth-century Antwerp estates listed by Duverger. Rubens would have understood the subject as one that illustrated a type of piety or grateful devotion. Indeed his first rendering of the subject, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, was owned, perhaps in his lifetime, by Carel van den Bosch, Bishop of Ghent (1597-1665).¹⁴ The artist would have been aware of its erotic appeal. Perhaps he was, too, inspired to emulate the antique painting as recorded in Valerius’s anecdote: ‘People stop in amazement and cannot take their eyes off this scene when they see the painting of it; as they marvel at what is before them the situation of that event long ago is recreated for them …’.¹⁵

Of the five extant compositions devised by Rubens, only one – the earliest of these variations (that in the Hermitage already referred to) – seems to be indisputably autograph, circa 1610. The Rijksmuseum picture – although much admired by connoisseurs in the past – seems to be chiefly the work of Rubens’s studio circa 1630. Whether it and a small group of related works were all prepared for by separate modelli is unlikely. They differ chiefly in adjustments to the poses, and the presence or absence of the gaolers – the latter important as a clear reference to the denouement of the story.

The first, perhaps only sketched by the artist, was vertical in format and was probably executed c. 1628 as it was engraved by Willem Panneels (c. 1600-1634) who left Rubens’s studio in 1630 (the master having been absent for some two years). It shows Pero kneeling on the block feeding a seated Cimon. She turns anxiously away as if she has heard the gaoler.¹⁶ It is impossible to devise a sequence of the next three compositions, one of which is known only by a later seventeenth-century engraving,¹⁷ the others being the Amsterdam picture, and that in the Museum des Siegerlandes, Siegen, which is also horizontal in format, but wider and higher than the Amsterdam version even before the addition at the top of a strip of canvas of approximately 25 cm.¹⁸ These last three may derive from different proposals drafted and altered by Rubens in a modello, of which there is no record.

In all three compositions, Pero is seated on a masonry block, as is Cimon in the Rijksmuseum version, while in the other two he kneels on the floor. In the Siegen picture, Rubens included Pero’s baby, asleep on the floor, its existence is only implied in the other compositions thus allowing for Pero to lactate. Two interventions in the Rijksmuseum picture, the inclusion of Cimon’s right hand and heel as afterthoughts, establish it as an evolving composition, the chronological sequence of which must remain obscure without close examination of the Siegen picture, in which the hand appears but the heel is covered.

Of the Amsterdam and Siegen versions, McGrath preferred the latter; nevertheless, it is likely that in the former Rubens himself was responsible at least for the white covering of Cimon, his right hand and grey hair, for Pero’s face and the heightening of her hair.¹⁹ The two works may have been essentially the work of the same studio assistant; certainly the gaolers in both pictures seem to be by the same painter, working in a style rather removed from that of Rubens.

The model for Cimon appears earlier in the composition engraved by Panneels; it may have been intended for use as St Nicholas of Tolentino, as apparent in the first modello at Frankfurt²⁰ for the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of circa 1628. Not dissimilar is the more aged of the two elders in the Munich Susanna and the Elders,²¹ and the saint kissing Christ’s hand in the Sint Jacobskerk altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Saints.²² The head of Pero, which was particularly admired by Reynolds, may have been inspired by the same model as that employed, for instance, for Venus in the National Gallery Judgement of Paris.²³

As McGrath pointed out, Rubens’s initial point of departure for the composition may well have been Beham’s etchings of Cimon and Pero, although the composition is there in reverse.²⁴ She also suggested that the motif of Pero, turning to see if she is being observed, may have been inspired by the painting attributed to Dirck van Baburen (1592/93-1624; York City Art Gallery) which may have been in Antwerp circa 1625.²⁵

Gregory Martin, 2022