Old woman with purse and golden coins, allegory of avarice

Allegorical representations of Avarice—typically showing an elderly person clutching coins by lamplight—were a staple of Caravaggist genre painting. Stom’s version from around 1650 transforms a moral commonplace into a psychologically penetrating character study. The subject belonged to a long tradition of depicting the vices, stretching back through Hieronymus Bosch to medieval morality imagery. Matthias Stom was a Dutch-born painter who spent virtually his entire working life in Italy, absorbing the Caravaggist tradition in Rome before settling permanently in Sicily around 1630.

Candlelight glints off the coins and catches the woman’s grasping fingers with metallic precision. The face is rendered with unflinching attention to the textures of aging skin, the moral allegory grounded in physical observation.