Caritas Romana

The body as the last act of love — an ancient image of devotion, painted in the hills of Turin.

Caritas Romana di Saturno is a mural created by artist Neve in 2013 in Chieri, Turin, for the Sketchmate festival.

"Caritas Romana di Saturno" is a mural painted in Chieri, Turin, for the Sketchmate festival in 2013. It takes as its starting point the Caritas Romana — the classical image of Pero, who secretly breastfed her imprisoned father Cimon to save him from death by starvation, an act of charity so radical it became a symbol of filial devotion and the power of the body to sustain life. Neve reinterprets the myth through Saturn. In place of the father and daughter, an old man — Saturn, the god of time, devourer of his own children — opens a wound in his arm and lets his blood flow into a glass. The symbol of Saturn marks him. Behind him, a young woman holds his arm, guiding the offering. The inversion is complete and precise. In the original myth, the young nourishes the old; here, the old bleeds for the young. Saturn — who in mythology consumed his offspring to hold on to power — here gives his blood instead. Time feeding life, rather than consuming it. The glass is not a wine glass: it is an hourglass. What fills it is not wine but time itself, red and finite.