Charity

Allori's Charity, dated around 1560 and painted on copper, is now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The personification of Charity — typically shown as a woman nursing or tending children, embodying Christian love — was among the most common of the cardinal and theological virtue personifications in Florentine Mannerist painting. The copper support places this among the high-quality devotional and cabinet objects that circulated among wealthy private collectors, for whom virtue personifications served as both devotional aids and demonstrations of humanist learning. Allori's Mannerist formation gave him the ideal vocabulary for personification — the idealized female figure, graceful in pose and precise in attribute — and his treatment of this subject would have drawn on Bronzino's precedents for similar allegorical figures. The Minneapolis acquisition reflects American museums' interest in Italian Mannerist small-scale works in the twentieth century.

Painted on copper, the work achieves the level of precision that the personification subject demands: attributes must be legible, the figure's idealized beauty must be apparent, and the compositional arrangement of the woman and her charges must read clearly at small scale. Copper's smooth ground enables all of this.