Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. Joseph Leo Koerner. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts; Bollingen Series 35:57. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. xiv + 412 pp. $65.
trates on two original masterpieces incorporating Roman Charity into complex religious scenes: Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy (1606–07) and Nicolas Poussin’s The Gathering of the Manna (ca. 1639), as well as their afterlives. Chapter 4 focuses on Valerius Maximus as a primary source and how the theme was taken up divergently by writers and visual artists. Also considered is the oral tradition promoting the father-daughter story as a riddle about kinship. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are more innovative, relating the reception of Roman Charity to broader contexts like the practice of adult breastfeeding in medical writings, the intertwining iconographies of Charity and the Madonna Lactans and their rhetorical allegorical meaning, and, finally, the legal discourse of father-daughter relationships. This brief review does not do justice to the analytic depth and breadth (at times somewhat unwieldy) of Sperling’s monograph. The scope of the book is so wide that the particular significance of some images of Roman Charity are glossed over in order to adapt to the general political and social interpretations of the author. In The Seven Works of Mercy, for example, Sperling notes that Cimon resembles Peter in another painting by Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1600–01). Through merging the identities of these two figures, Sperling infers that Caravaggio “expresses his contempt for the Roman papacy, which, guilty and condemned to die, is shown to parasitically consume the vital body fluids of his dutiful daughter, the people of Rome” (129). This oversimplified and reductive explanation of Caravaggio’s Roman Charity cannot be challenged here (the artist’s frequently unpredictable repetition of models is a topic long debated by specialists). In the end, sporadic instances of forced interpretation do not detract from the overall importance of Sperling’s book, which crosses over diverse disciplines, providing much provocative food for thoughtful social, art, and gender historians.