Pablo Ruiz Picasso offers an introduction into some general problems of interpretation of nineteenth-century European painting as a whole, and Spain specifically, at a key turning point in Picasso, and Modernism's, trajectory. Science and Charity is an example of how popular allegories were transformed by late nineteenth-century artists to help visualize larger social, metaphysical and, ultimately, aesthetic issues. Art historian María Teresa Ocaña sees Science and Charity as a 'watershed in Picasso's career' and as the last hommage 'Picasso granted his father'. The problems posed by Science and Charity are not those of heritage or genealogies that lead to mythic origins, at least not visual ones; such problems are the domain of provenance and iconography. The artistic debates concerning Naturalism versus idealism were, in Spain, nothing less than what has been termed 'culture wars' concerning the relations between the State, science and the Catholic religion.