After a female friend boasted of the jewels she owned, Cornelia Africana, a widowed Roman matron and mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (known as the Gracchi), declared her sons to be her jewels. Cornelia educated the boys after their father’s death and they went on to serve as tribunes (powerful elected officials) in Rome in the late second century BC. Here Cornelia points to the books held by her young sons in contrast to the pearl necklace lifted from the jewellery box by her friend.
The quality of the top portion of this painting suggests that it is an old seventeenth-century copy, perhaps made because the original was damaged or destroyed. The lower portion of the painting might conceivably be by Padovanino, a painter from Padua who worked in Venice.
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