A new historical study sheds light on the remarkable and often brutal story of Europe's first dedicated foundling hospital, revealing its profound influence on the art and social conscience of the Italian Renaissance.
The Innocenti: A Beacon and a Business
In the heart of Renaissance Florence stood the Hospital of the Innocents (Ospedale degli Innocenti), founded by the Silk Weavers Guild. Built with arches designed by the famed architect Filippo Brunelleschi, it opened its doors in 1445. The first recorded foundling, a baby girl named Agata, was discovered at its gates on Saint Agata's Day that same year, having already been nibbled by mice.
This institution emerged in a society where children constituted half the population of Florence, and abandonment was tragically common. Contraception was primitive and condemned by the Church, leading to desperate acts. Babies were left in churches, dumped in rivers, or discarded on rubbish heaps, known in Tuscan vernacular as the gittatelli – the thrown-away ones. Many were girls, born into a fiercely patriarchal society, often the result of masters exploiting servants.
Art, Anguish, and the Idea of Childhood
The hospital was a paradox of high-minded compassion and stark utilitarianism. While it commissioned and housed works by Renaissance masters like Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and della Robbia, its charges were often fed a meagre diet of bread and water, the bread made from bran also given to mules. It lessened the stigma of illegitimacy, which was akin to a "living death", and saved many from destitution or trafficking.
However, its practices were frequently cruel. Babies were farmed out to wet nurses who sometimes treated them as cash cows, neglecting them and even collecting payments after their deaths. Boys received an education in maths, rhetoric, and music, while girls were taught weaving and pushed into domestic service, a role that made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
A Legacy of Civilisation and Barbarism
Joseph Luzzi's book, The Innocents of Florence, paints a vivid, cinematic picture of this world. Luzzi, a Bard College professor and Dante scholar, argues the institution helped forge the modern notion that every child's fate matters. Its model inspired others globally, including London's Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital in 1739.
The Innocenti stands as a powerful case study in how the sublime beauty of the Renaissance – its frescoes and paintings – often masked underlying suffering. As the critic Walter Benjamin observed, "There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The hospital's story is a poignant testament to this complex truth, where groundbreaking care and breathtaking art coexisted with profound hardship.
