Caritas as a Glamorous Mom

In Renaissance art, the Christian virtue caritas--charity or selfless love (agape), as in 1 Corinthians 13--is shown as a nursing mother. Beginning in the 14th century, this image replaced earlier ones of Charity doing the good works enumerated in Matthew 25:35-36, notably clothing the naked.

As a historical matter, the image probably derives from the portrayal of the Virgin Mary as Virgo Lactans, suckling her son and thus emphasizing the full humanity of the Incarnation. (One of the earliest portrayals of Mary, the Virgo Lactans itself mirrors the iconography of Isis nursing Horus.)

But why did a nursing mother seem appropriate as an emblem of Charity? Hanna Rosin's recent Atlantic article, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" (like many  headlines, this one overstates the author's actual argument), offers a clue:

Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

Breast-feeding, in other words, is a real pain and, thus, a generous act of sustenance, an appropriate metaphor for Charity. As Rosin's article makes clear, it is decidedly unglamorous--though pro-nursing propagandists sometimes make it so.

So does this beautiful image of Caritas from Filippino Lippi's Strozzi Chapel frescos in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Young, sexy, and serene, with adorable, well-behaved children and suggestive flowing tresses, Caritas hardly makes nursing--or, by implication, good deeds--seem like a sacrifice. For Strozzi women, it wasn't. As art historian Jonathan Nelson, an expert on Filippino Lippi, pointed out to me, Renaissance viewers would have seen the portrait not as a mother but as a wet nurse. As in so many instances, the key to maintaining real-world glamour is having good help.