One of the leading artists in Genoa during the second half of the seventeenth century, Domenico Piola came from a successful family of artists, renowned for their many illusionistic ceiling programs throughout Genoese churches and palaces. A prolific draughtsman and painter, Domenico oversaw an extremely productive studio. In addition to his collaborations with numerous other artists, Domenico also provided many designs for book illustrations and prints that circulated throughout Europe, earning him international exposure and high acclaim in his own day. This painting's lively composition relates stylistically to a number of similar scale paintings illustrating Allegories for the Marriage of Doria-Pamphili executed in the 1670s.

The present painting is unique in its imagery as it conflates two distinct if related subjects. On the one hand it is an Allegory of Charity -- represented by the central female figure shown with her traditional attributes of a flame (behind her head) and fruit, and accompanied by small children. In this context the child at the rear left holding a cross may allude to Faith -much as it does in Piola's iconographically related Allegory of Faith-Charity in the Accademia Ligustico, Genoa. At the same time the painting is a variation on the theme of the Holy Family with the Madonna and Child, the Young St. John, and another boy presenting a bundle of apples to Christ in the foreground. Cast under an atmospheric shadow behind and above the central group, St. John grasps in each hand a significant motif: the conventional attribute of a cross (the emblem of Christ's sacrifice) in his right, and an apple (the traditional symbol of the fall of man), in his left. The full spectrum of the painting's theological meaning culminates in the seemingly trivial activity exchanged between the two children in the foreground. Christ's active reach toward the fruit offered him may be understood as an allusion to his future mission as Redeemer, carried out through Christ's death and sacrifice, necessitated by the fall of man.